Real-time Testbed for Validating Distributed Antenna Scenarios

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) promise to deliver solutions for the future wireless challenges using multiple remote radio heads (RRHs) in a distributed architecture, thereby supporting high frequency re-use, increased coverage, decreasing interference and latency. DAS architecture consists of multiple RRHs connected to a centralized base station via an optical fiber network. This work explains different DAS deployment techniques on a real-time LTE system. It focuses on the implementation details of LTE PHY on a TI (Texas Instruments) DSP and corresponding processing blocks that need to be adapted to support the functionality of DAS. Different DAS use case scenarios of deployment, their advantages and key performance indicators, are analyzed. This work also includes the measurement results of deploying antenna selection scenario to investigate and validate DAS on a real-time LTE system.