MIMO evaluation platform for fast hardware baseband reconfiguration of advanced wireless networks

Communication systems will have to support an ever increasing number of transmission standards. In this context, the reconfiguration capability appears as a promising solution for designing multi-standard terminals with a limited impact on the size, cost and power consumption budgets. This paper describes a hardware realtime reconfigurable hardware platform, developed jointly by CEA-LETI and MERCE in the context of the CELTIC project WINNER+. This platform, implements a basic 3GPP/LTE system composed of a terminal and a base station. The terminal baseband architecture is based on the MAGALI ASIC developed by CEA-LETI. Based on a Network-on-Chip (NoC) technology, it allows the dynamic reconfiguration of the system. The base station relies on a more traditional FPGA prototyping platform. The reconfiguration is showcased by switching the transmission mode from a 3GPP/LTE SIMO (1×2) mode to a 3GPP/LTE compliant 2×2 MIMO mode. Consequently, the platform is used to measure the benefit of spatial transmission diversity scheme envisioned for the evolutions of 3GPP/LTE (LTE-A) system compared to basic transmission such as specified in the LTE standard.