Massive MIMO test system to have 100 nodes

National Instruments (NI) and Lund University have announced a collaboration on the development of a test bed capable of prototyping a massive multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) system.

The test bed will consist of a massive MIMO base station with 100 transmit and receive nodes. Researchers can link several pieces of user equipment that simulate mobile devices with the massive MIMO base station and emulate a real-world scenario in order to evaluate how the performance of massive MIMO compares to theory.

Massive MIMO is a relatively new concept in 5G communications and addresses capacity and energy challenges facing next-generation communication systems. The commitment from Lund University and NI towards the development of a massive MIMO test bed represents an ambitious collaboration. With more than 100 antennas, this prototype is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, making it the first test bed to reach this level of magnitude and complexity on the road to 5G.

The massive MIMO involves the deployment of base stations with very large-scale antenna arrays, encompassing perhaps hundreds of transceiver elements, to increase network capacity, improve reliability and reduce the overall transmitted power in a channel.

Theoretically, the total transmitted power from the large antenna array would be less than the transmitted power of a single antenna serving a designated cell or region, while delivering the same or higher data rates.

Massive MIMO has been the topic of many research papers, but no one has been able to test the concept in a real-world scenario of the scale proposed by Lund University and NI.