A Flexible Testbed for the Rapid Prototyping of MIMO Baseband Modules

Hardware platforms and testbeds are an essential tool to evaluate, in realistic scenarios, the performance of multiple-input-multiple-ouput (MIMO) systems. In this work we present a simple and easily reconfigurable 2 times 2 MIMO testbed for the rapid prototyping of the signal processing baseband functions. The signal generation module consists of a host PC equipped with a board that contains two high performance 100 MHz DACs and a 1 GB memory module that allows the transmission of extremely large frames of data. At the receiver side, we use another host PC equipped with two 105 MHz ADCs, another 1 GB memory module and a trigger that starts the acquisition process when the presence of signal is detected. The platform has been designed to operate at the ISM band of 2.4 GHz with a RF bandwidth of 20 MHz. In order to minimize the number of DAC and ADC circuits, signals are generated and acquired at an IF of 15 MHz. Upconversion to RF is performed with two RF vectorial signal generators (Agilent E4438C) and downconversion with two specific circuits designed from commercial components. Transmitter and receiver signal processing functions are implemented off-line in Matlab. To illustrate the performance and capabilities of the platform, we present the results of two experiments of a 2 times 2 MIMO transmission with Alamouti coding.