Beamspace MIMO prototype for low-complexity Gigabit/s wireless communication

The rapid proliferation of data hungry devices is creating a bandwidth crisis, with aggregate data rates expected to increase 1000 fold by 2020. Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) systems, operating in the 30-300GHz band, are poised to meet this exploding demand through large bandwidths and high-dimensional MIMO operation. However traditional MIMO techniques result in prohibitively high-complexity transceivers. In this paper, we report initial results on a Continuous Aperture Phase MIMO (CAP-MIMO) prototype that uses a discrete lens array (DLA) for analog spatial beamforming to reduce complexity. The CAP-MIMO prototype is based on the theory of beamspace MIMO communication - modulating data onto orthogonal spatial beams - to achieve near-optimal performance with the lowest transceiver complexity. We build on previous theoretical and experimental results to construct a prototype CAP-MIMO link at 10GHz for line-of-sight communication and for initial proof-of-concept demonstration. The prototype supports four spatial channels with Gigabits/s data rates.