Towards a real-time UWB MIMO testbed for sensing and communications

This paper reports a research testbed of real-time ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio. In the receiver design, the UWB MIMO receiver supports up to eight channels, where each channel is equipped with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with 8-bit resolution and sampling rate up to 3 Giga samples per second (Gsps). The transmitter is able to transmit two independent arbitrary waveforms with bandwidth up to 500 MHz. Multiple high performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips are utilized as realtime processors at both transmitter and receiver to handle huge amount of high speed data. As part of the whole system, the UWB MIMO receiver baseband is developed and tested using pulse based UWB signals. Experiment setup and results are presented and discussed. To the authors' best knowledge, this radio testbed built at Tennessee Technological University is the first UWB MIMO testbed ever reported.