An 8×8 FPGA-based MIMO-OFDM real-time transmission testbed: OGNO implementation and experimental results

Hardware testbeds are an essential tool to evaluate the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in a realistic environment. However, most of the existing MIMO transmission testbeds have been conducted under less than or equal to four antennas. An 8×8 field programmable gate arrays (FGPA)-based MIMO-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) real-time transmission testbed has been developed by the DOCOMO Beijing Labs (DBL) in a typical indoor environment. Our objective is twofold: 1) to validate the functionality of MIMO and OFDM technologies; 2) meanwhile, to verify our receiver detection algorithm, orthogonal grouping-based near optimal detection algorithm (OGNO), proposed for high order MIMO systems. This paper presents a description of the testbed, detailing the testbed architecture, algorithms interest and hardware components. Moreover, we also present measurement results and show the impact of spatial correlation on system performance.