Low-complexity distributed MIMO receiver and its implementation on the OpenAirInterface platform

In order to maximize the system throughput, future wireless communication systems will employ a very tight frequency reuse. This leads to interference limited systems where the interference is high at the cell edges. The key ingredient to such networks are thus receivers that are able to exploit the structure of this interference instead of nulling or attenuating it. In this paper we apply such a receiver structure to a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scenario to decode two independent data streams from two synchronized base stations. Further we show how the distributed MIMO receiver is implemented in real-time on the OpenAirInterface platform and provide results from field trials and compare them to the simulation results. Applications of the distributed MIMO receiver include single-frequency cellular as well as mesh networks. OpenAirInterface is an experimental open-source real-time hardware and software platform for experimentation in wireless communications and signal processing. Its current implementation provides a full software modem comprising physical and link layer functionalities for cellular and mesh network topologies.