Implementation and evaluation of an OFDM-based MIMO system

In this paper, we consider the implementation and evaluation of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system, which doubles the transmission data rate of the IEEE 802.11a conforming system using two transmit and two receive antennas. A function reconfigurable hardware platform is developed for the system using the Texas instruments TMS320VC33 DSP as its core processor and the high speed PCI bus as its PC-DSP interface. On this platform, we partially implement the receiver of the system. To investigate the feasibility of real-time implementation, the computational efficiency and complexity of the receiver are also evaluated, which shows that the MIMO receiver works very efficiently and will not increase the hardware complexity too much.