Design of Reconfigurable SDR Platform for Antenna Selection Aided MIMO Communication System

In recent years, antenna selection (AS) has become one of the most popular research topics for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system due to its capability of reducing the number of radio frequency chains utilized for MIMO communications, while remaining the MIMO advantages, such as increased bandwidth efficiency and reliability. In this paper, an efficient norm-based AS (NBAS) algorithm is investigated and implemented in the software defined radio (SDR) MIMO communication platform, which consists of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Owing to the high freedom and fast reconfigurable FPGA hardware, the SDR MIMO communication platform is capable of developing prototype of NBAS-aided MIMO system. More specifically, the implemented NBAS aided SDR MIMO system is capable of achieving uplink communication from users to the base station via time division duplex (TDD). A time-varying fading channel generation model is designed for SDR MIMO platform to enrich our experimental results. Additionally, a novel multiplexer (MUX) circuit module is designed and implemented to enhance the hardware performance of the FPGA in term of delay and resource usage. The results show that by implementing the low-complexity NBAS, the channel capacity performance of the SDR MIMO system can be significantly improved by around 15%. It is also showed that our proposed optimized MUX circuit intellectual property may reduce the critical path delay by about 2.16 ns, and save at lease 3% hardware resources in SDR FPGA.