Vienna MIMO testbed

Abstract

While the field of MIMO transmission has been explored over thepast decade mainly theoretically, relatively few results exist onhow these transmissions perform over realistic, imperfectchannels. The reason for this is that measurement equipment isexpensive, difficult to obtain, and often inflexible when amultitude of transmission parameters are of interest. This paperpresents a flexible testbed developed to examine MIMO algorithmsand channel models described in literature by transmitting data at 2.45GHz through real, physical channels, supportingsimultaneously four transmit and four receive antennas. Operationis performed directly from Matlab allowing for a cornucopia ofreal-world experiments with minimum effort. Examples measuring biterror rates on space-time block codes are provided in the paper.