Vienna MIMO Testbed

Abstract

While the field of MIMO transmission has been explored over the past decade mainly theoretically, relatively few results exist on how these transmissions perform over realistic, imperfect channels. The reason for this is that measurement equipment is expensive, difficult to obtain, and often inflexible when a multitude of transmission parameters are of interest. This paper presents a flexible testbed developed to examine MIMO algorithms and channel models described in literature by transmitting data at 2.45 GHz through real, physical channels, supporting simultaneously four transmit and four receive antennas. Operation is performed directly from Matlab allowing for a cornucopia of real-world experiments with minimum effort. Examples measuring bit error rates on space-time block codes are provided in the paper.

MATLAB as a Design and Verification Tool for the Hardware Prototyping of Wireless Communication Systems

“…Indeed, MATLAB plays a key role in off-line testbeds that are used to prototype state-of-the-art MIMO-OFDM systems [9][10][11][12][13].…”

Rapid Prototyping for Evaluating Vehicular Communications

“…Other examples of this type of platforms can be found in (19,20,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34). If the features of the implemented MIMO platform are compared with the others found in the testbeds cited, it can be concluded that:…”

“…Rapid prototyping for hardware testbeds (18,19,20)), and the experimental tests they have allowed to perform have been valuable for researchers. In the same way, research in vehicular communications can…”

An accurate and low complex channel estimator for OFDM WiMAX

“…A full description of the measurement setup can be found in [4]. For our measurements we used the Vienna MIMO Testbed presented in [5,6] and a Matlab implementation of the IEEE 802.16-2004 WiMAX standard [7]. The basic features of the testbed are as follows.…”