Testbed Design for Throughput Characterization of a Multiple Antenna Stucture.

Abstract

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) schemes have generated a lot of interest due to their ability to efficiently use the limited spectral resources available to users around the world. The MIMO concept has afforded work in many subtending fields of research, such as channel modeling, signaling schemes and receiver designs, coding and adaptability of MIMO to existing and future standards, which aim towards making this technique a more feasible and popular choice.

One of the interesting fields of study that has spawned from MIMO is the building of testbeds and prototypes of MIMO systems. The need for testbed creation comes from the fact that there is a need for validation of results generated by theoretical analysis. The use of testbeds and prototypes of a system can help characterize the gains of a proposed solution and hence can provide an initial sanity check for the solution at hand. It also provides an initial cost estimate which would have a major bearing on the marketability of a given idea. An end-to-end implementation would enable testing of different blocks of the design independently and the evaluation of their effect in conjunction with methods being used in other parts of the design, thus giving a much needed indication of system design complexities which go a long way in determining the design choice and hence the overall design architecture.

This work aims to implement such a system to enable the performance evaluation of a newly proposed antenna design as a means of providing an example solution to the prototyping concept. This document focuses on the core ideas that constitute a non-realtime implementation, consisting of the design of a simplified RF frontend and a software-defined backend. The applicability of this implementation in providing sufficient measurement information to characterize the solutions for MIMO is justified.