Automatic Distributed MIMO Testbed for Beyond 5G Communication Experiments

Abstract

This paper demonstrates an automated testbed suitable for beyond-5G distributed MIMO experiments, where bandwidth, number of transmitters and precoding methods are flexible and configured through a central unit. This is based on an all-digital radio-over-fiber approach to communication through 12 fully coherent, low-complexity remote radio transmitters. An automated robot receiver is implemented to facilitate efficient communication data collection in realistic environments. Using the proposed system, co-located and distributed MIMO communication antenna configurations are compared in a real in-door environment. The results show that distributed MIMO provides more significantly more uniform power distribution and better overall MIMO capacity compared to co-located MIMO.