Design and Implementation of a TDD-Based 128-Antenna Massive MIMO Prototyping System

Abstract: Spurred by the dramatic mobile IP growth and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud-based applications, wireless networking is witnessing a paradigm shift. By fully exploiting the spatial degrees of freedom, the massive multipleinput- multiple-output (MIMO) technology promises significant gains in both data rates and link reliability. This paper presents a time-division duplex (TDD)-based 128-antenna massive MIMO prototyping system designed to operate on a 20 MHz bandwidth. Up to twelve single-antenna users can be served by the designed system at the same time. System model is provided and link-level simulation corresponding to our practical TDDbased massive MIMO prototyping system is conducted to validate our design and performance of the algorithms. Based on the system hardware design demonstrated in this paper, both uplink real-time video and downlink data transmissions are realized, and the experiment results show that 268.8 Mbps rate was achieved for eight single-antenna users using QPSK modulation. The maximum spectral efficiency of the designed system will be 80.64 bit/s/Hz by twelve single-antenna users with 256-QAM modulation.