New testbed leads the way for the next generation of wireless systems research
National Instruments and Lund University today announced their collaboration to develop a test bed capable of "Massive MIMO" (MIMO: Multiple Input, Multiple Output) prototyping. The test bench will consist of a “Massive MIMO” base station with 100 transmitting and receiving nodes. Researchers can link multiple user equipment simulating mobile devices to the "Massive MIMO" base station. They can emulate a real world scenario in order to assess how massive MIMO performance is compared to theory.
“Massive MIMO” is a relatively new concept in 5G communications and addresses the capacity and power challenges faced by next generation communications systems. This commitment by Lund University and NI towards the development of a "Massive MIMO" testbed represents an ambitious collaboration. With more than 100 antennas, this prototype is the largest and most complete in its class, making it the first testbed to reach this level of magnitude and complexity on the road to 5G. Lund University researchers Ove Edfors and Fredrik Tufvesson said: “We are very pleased with the commitment that National Instruments has shown to our Massive MIMO research and benchmark. Through this partnership, we believe we will be able to deliver groundbreaking results that could significantly impact the definition of the 5G networks of the future."
“At National Instruments, we believe that our PXI platform and the USRP software-defined radio platform, in combination with NI LabVIEW graphical system design software, are the perfect technologies for prototyping such a system,” James said. Kimery, director of RF communications and research at National Instruments. “Without these technologies, prototyping such a system would not be practical. We are very pleased to partner with Lund University on this project to investigate and evaluate the "Massive MIMO" concept and contribute to 5G research efforts."
General information about “Massive MIMO”
The concept of "Massive MIMO" involves the deployment of base stations with large-scale antenna arrays, encompassing perhaps hundreds of transceiver elements, to increase network capacity, improve reliability, and reduce the total power transmitted over a channel. Theoretically, the total power transmitted by the large array of antennas would be less than the transmit power of a single antenna to serve a designated cell or region, while delivering the same or higher data rates. "Massive MIMO" has been the subject of numerous research papers, but no one has been able to prove the concept in a real scenario on the scale proposed by Lund University and NI.
