A flexible 100-antenna testbed for Massive MIMO

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the main candidates to be included in the fifth generation (5G) cellular systems. For further system development it is desirable to have real-time testbeds showing possibilities and limitations of the technology. In this paper we describe the Lund University Massive MIMO testbed — LuMaMi. It is a flexible testbed where the base station operates with up to 100 coherent radio-frequency transceiver chains based on software radio technology. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) based signaling is used for each of the 10 simultaneous users served in the 20 MHz bandwidth. Real time MIMO precoding and decoding is distributed across 50 Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGAs with PCI-Express interconnects. The unique features of this system are: (i) high throughput processing of 384 Gbps of real time baseband data in both the transmit and receive directions, (ii) low-latency architecture with channel estimate to precoder turnaround of less than 500 micro seconds, and (iii) a flexible extension up to 128 antennas. We detail the design goals of the testbed, discuss the signaling and system architecture, and show initial measured results for a uplink Massive MIMO over-the-air transmission from four single-antenna UEs to 100 BS antennas.