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Programmable Millimeter-Wave MIMO Radios with Real-Time Baseband Processing

Published: 02 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Baseband processing is one of the most time-consuming and computationally expensive tasks in radio access networks (RANs), which is typically realized in dedicated hardware. The concept of virtualizing the RAN functions by moving their computation to edge data centers can significantly reduce the deployment cost and enable more flexible use of the network resources. Recent studies have focused on software-based baseband processing for large-scale sub-6 GHz MIMO systems, while 5G also embraces the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands to achieve further improved data rates leveraging the widely available spectrum. Therefore, it is important to build a platform for the experimental investigation of software-based baseband processing for mmWave MIMO systems. In this paper, we implement programmable mmWave MIMO radios equipped with realtime baseband processing capability, leveraging the open-access PAWR COSMOS testbed. We first develop Agora-UHD, which enables UHD-based software-defined radios (SDRs) to interface with Agora, an open-source software realization of real-time massive MIMO baseband processing. Next, we integrate Agora-UHD with the USRP SDRs and IBM 28 GHz phased array antenna module (PAAM) subsystem boards deployed in the PAWR COSMOS testbed. We demonstrate a 2×2 28 GHz polarization MIMO link with a bandwidth of 122.88 MHz, and show that it can meet the real-time processing deadline of 0.375 ms (3 transmission time intervals for numerology 3 in 5G NR FR2) using only 8 CPU cores. The source code of Agora-UHD and its integration with the programmable 28 GHz radios in the COSMOS testbed with example tutorials are made publicly available.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Demo: Experimentation with Mobile 28 GHz Phased Array Antenna ModulesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3698841(1730-1732)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)m3MIMO: An 8×8 mmWave Multi-User MIMO Testbed for Wireless ResearchProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3697321(1922-1929)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Savannah: Efficient mmWave Baseband Processing with Minimal and Heterogeneous ResourcesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690707(1500-1514)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
WiNTECH '23: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & Characterization
October 2023
115 pages
ISBN:9798400703409
DOI:10.1145/3615453
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 02 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. Millimeter-wave communication
  2. software-defined radios
  3. virtualized radio access networks
  4. wireless experimentation

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Overall Acceptance Rate 63 of 100 submissions, 63%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Demo: Experimentation with Mobile 28 GHz Phased Array Antenna ModulesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3698841(1730-1732)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)m3MIMO: An 8×8 mmWave Multi-User MIMO Testbed for Wireless ResearchProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3697321(1922-1929)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Savannah: Efficient mmWave Baseband Processing with Minimal and Heterogeneous ResourcesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690707(1500-1514)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Geo2SigMap: High-Fidelity RF Signal Mapping Using Geographic Databases2024 IEEE International Symposium on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN)10.1109/DySPAN60163.2024.10632773(277-285)Online publication date: 13-May-2024

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