Real-time Distributed MIMO Systems

Recent years have seen a lot of work in moving distributed MIMO from theory to practice. While this prior work demonstrates the feasibility of synchronizing multiple transmitters in time, frequency, and phase, none of them deliver a full-fledged PHY capable of supporting distributed MIMO in real-tim...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hamed, Ezzeldin Omar Hussein, Rahul, Hariharan Shankar, Abdelghany, Mohammed Ahmed, Katabi, Dina
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113051
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3570-7789
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4854-4157
Description
Summary:Recent years have seen a lot of work in moving distributed MIMO from theory to practice. While this prior work demonstrates the feasibility of synchronizing multiple transmitters in time, frequency, and phase, none of them deliver a full-fledged PHY capable of supporting distributed MIMO in real-time. Further, none of them can address dynamic environments or mobile clients. Addressing these challenges, requires new solutions for low-overhead and fast tracking of wireless channels, which are the key parameters of any distributed MIMO system. It also requires a software-hardware architecture that can deliver a distributed MIMO within a full-fledged 802.11 PHY, while still meeting the tight timing constraints of the 802.11 protocol. This architecture also needs to perform coordinated power control across distributed MIMO nodes, as opposed to simply letting each node perform power control as if it were operating alone. This paper describes the design and implementation of MegaMIMO 2.0, a system that achieves these goals and delivers the first real-time fully distributed 802.11 MIMO system.