A Flexible HW and SW Co-operated Baseband Research Platform for Massive MIMO System
31 July 2017
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (massive MIMO) system or so-called large scale antenna system (LSAS) has been identified as one of the promising candidates for the 5G wireless communications. In general, a massive MIMO architecture contains two main parts, the massive MIMO baseband digital platform and the massive MIMO radio platform. Although several studies have been already performed on the achievable theoretical results of the technology and associated impairments, fewer has been done so far in the area of real implementation complexity analysis, reduced cost research platform, hardware and software required functional blocks and interactions. The object of this paper is to introduce a low-cost scalable massive MIMO research platform with flexible co-operated hardware (HW) and software (SW) baseband processing. The proposed research platform plays an important role in exploring theoptimal configuration of a massive MIMO digital platform, processing algorithm complexity reduction, procedure and protocols definition towards a high performance software-defined massive MIMO system. The experimental HW and SW results of the key processing units preliminarily verify the feasibility and achievable performance of the proposed flexible and scalable massive MIMO digital platform built with a co-operated general purpose processor (GPP) unit and an FPGA evaluation board.
