AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin

Alamouti OFDM/OQAM systems with time reversal technique

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing with Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OFDM/OQAM) is a multicarrier modulation scheme that can be considered as an alternative to the conventional Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with Cyclic Prefix (CP) for transmission over multipath fading channels. In this paper, we investigate the combination of the OFDM/OQAM with Alamouti system with Time Reversal (TR) technique. TR can be viewed as a precoding scheme which can be combined with OFDM/OQAM and easily carried out in a Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) context such as Alamouti system. We present the simulation results of the performance of OFDM/OQAM system in SISO case compared with the conventional CP-OFDM system and the performance of the combination Alamouti OFDM/OQAM with TR compared to Alamouti CP-OFDM. The performance is derived by computing the Bit Error Rate (BER) as a function of the transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)

MIMO precoding for filter bank modulation systems based on PSVD

In this paper we consider the design of a linearly precoded MIMO transceiver based on filter bank (FB) modulation for transmission over broadband frequency selective fading channels. The modulation FB is capable of lowering the channel dispersion at sub-channel level. Nevertheless, the sub-channels experience some level of inter-symbol interference. Therefore, the pre-coder and the equalizer are designed exploiting the polynomial singular value decomposition (PSVD). In particular, we consider two types of FB system. The first system deploys maximal frequency confined pulses and it is referred to as filtered multitone (FMT) modulation, while the second uses maximal time confined pulses with rectangular impulse response, i.e., it corresponds to the conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. We compare the performance of the considered systems in terms of capacity over typical WLAN channels, showing that PSVD precoding with FMT can outperform the performance of precoded OFDM in the two-bytwo antenna case especially for moderate to low SNRs