Design of Reconfigurable SDR Platform for Antenna Selection Aided MIMO Communication System

Abstract

In recent years, antenna selection (AS) has become one of the most popular research topics for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system due to its capability of reducing the number of radio frequency chains utilized for MIMO communications, while remaining the MIMO advantages, such as increased bandwidth efficiency and reliability. In this paper, an efficient norm-based AS (NBAS) algorithm is investigated and implemented in the software defined radio (SDR) MIMO communication platform, which consists of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Owing to the high freedom and fast reconfigurable FPGA hardware, the SDR MIMO communication platform is capable of developing prototype of NBAS-aided MIMO system. More specifically, the implemented NBAS aided SDR MIMO system is capable of achieving uplink communication from users to the base station via time division duplex (TDD). A time-varying fading channel generation model is designed for SDR MIMO platform to enrich our experimental results. Additionally, a novel multiplexer (MUX) circuit module is designed and implemented to enhance the hardware performance of the FPGA in term of delay and resource usage. The results show that by implementing the low-complexity NBAS, the channel capacity performance of the SDR MIMO system can be significantly improved by around 15%. It is also showed that our proposed optimized MUX circuit intellectual property may reduce the critical path delay by about 2.16 ns, and save at lease 3% hardware resources in SDR FPGA. INDEX TERMS Multiple-input multiple-output, antenna selection, software defined radio, FPGA.

User Oriented Transmit Antenna Selection in Massive Multi-User MIMO SDR Systems

“…The parameters of MIMO system are shown in Table 3. More details about these system parameters are discussed in reference [3,27].…”

“…In this paper, we modify the antenna selection aided SDR MIMO platform reported in [3] in order to implement the proposed UOSTxAS system with an up to 8-antenna base station (BS) and up to four single-antenna users. Table 1 and Figure 2 show the required hardware devices in the proposed UOSTxAS system.…”

“…In the proposed system a latency of t s = 20 ms is set for the antenna switching process when selecting better antennas according to H. Please note that t s can be determined by users with other reasonable value. The rest of the NI SDR MIMO platform that is reported in [3] is then changed accordingly to meet the requirement of the UOSTxAS scheme.…”

“…The AS aided SDR MIMO platform that is proposed in [ 3 ] is based on NI SDR comprises an eight-antenna BS and up to four single-antenna users as shown in Figure 2 . The AS aided SDR MIMO platform uses OFDM modulation to reduce interference between waveforms in channel in order to enable high-speed signals transmission in multi-path and fading channels.…”

“…Recently, massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems [1][2][3][4] have been considered to have significant potential to play an important role in the 5G as well as the coming 6G wireless networks [5,6] due to the capability of increasing communication reliability and/or bandwidth efficiency. However, in conventional full MIMO systems, multiple radio frequency (RF) chains are utilized, which may substantially increase the power consumption and hardware costs.…”