MIMO communication theory, algorithms, and prototyping

This tutorial will present a brief overview of MIMO fundamentals, including information theory basics, space-time coding, spatial multiplexing, multiuser MIMO, and MIMO interference alignment. Owing to their great promise, MIMO systems have found their way in several standards for future wireless communications systems, especially for wireless local area networks and cellular networks. Examples of these standards include IEEE 802.11, 802.16 (WiMAX), HSPDA, and LTE. Several MIMO configurations are being considered for these applications, including 2×2 and 4×4 with space-time block coding schemes. Since MIMO technology is now included in emerging wireless standards, we need to equip wireless practitioners with tools that enable them to implement MIMO techniques for real-world systems such as IEEE 802.11,WiMAX, HSPDA, and LTE. The major objective of the tutorial is to expose the audience to the system level design flow and prototyping of basic MIMO communication techniques based on an FPGA based demo platform. In particular, the tutorial will explain some of the practical difficulties in designing and implementing MIMO systems based on an experimental MIMO hardware platform that has been developed. It will also briefly review effective and novel real-time algorithms that balance complexity/performance tradeoffs.