Development of 4 × 4 MIMO-OFDM system and test measurement

We are developing a compact PCI (cPCI) based prototype of a 4 × 4 multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system for the measurement and analysis of propagation and transmission characteristics in real environments. The target of this system is a MIMO extension of the IEEE802.11a standard, i.e. 5 GHz frequency band, 20 MHz bandwidth. The sampling rates of digital-analog converters (DACs) and analog-digital converters (ADCs) are both 80 Msps, thus enabling 20 MHz bandwidth measurements. In addition, 2 Mgates field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are used for pre- and post-processing of each channel, so that we can take advantage of the FPGA´s parallel processing capability for simultaneous multichannel processing as well as its reconfigurability for implementation of various MIMO-OFDM algorithms.