Experiments are an integral part of wireless communications. However, today most of the experimentation is happening mostly in industrial environments, since wireless communications systems have become very complex and expensive to build and maintain.
One way to bridge the gap between visionary academic research and industrial research are flexible and easily reconfigurable testbeds.
The EURECOM OpenAirInterface is such a testbed and comprises (i) a radio transceiver card combining radio front-end and analogue/digital converters and (ii) an open-source software defined radio that runs in real-time on common x86 Linux machines.
In this presentation we show how experimentation can be used to advance the field of cellular multi-user (MU) MIMO communications. We show how to use the OpenAirInterface testbed to collect and analyze measurements and how to build proof-of-concepts for new innovative ideas in the field.
The research questions that we will address are
- What is the capacity of MU-MIMO in real channel conditions?
- How do we obtain channel state information at the transmitter in TDD systems?
- How do can receivers cope with residual MU interference?
- How do we model MU-MIMO on a system level?