Design space exploration of a cooperative MIMO receiver for reconfigurable architectures

Cooperative MIMO is a new technique that allows disjoint wireless communication nodes (e.g. wireless sensors) to form a virtual antenna array to increase bandwidth, reliability and/or transmission distance. It differs fundamentally from other MIMO communication since the signals received from each node have a relative timing and frequency offset due to the distributed nature of their transmitting antennas. Therefore, the receiver must estimate the timing and frequency for each transmitting node, in addition to the MIMO channel. In this paper, we design and implement a receiver for the cooperative MIMO problem using reconfigurable hardware. We discuss the computation required for each stage of the receiver and perform experimental study of the tradeoffs between area, power, performance and quality of results. The end result is an efficient, parameterizable, cooperative MIMO receiver implemented on several different state-of-the-art FPGAs devices.