Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] (GSoC) MIMO stuff in GNU Radio

[YiZiRui Zhou]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 9:15 PM, Michael Dickens <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Zhou - Can you post some links to relevant papers / research, for folks like me to do a quick look at?  I studied MIMO just a little bit, mostly from an IT perspective, not a practical one.  But, I've read through a lot of papers (on many subjects) and would be interested in knowing more about practical MIMO.  I encourage you to get your project up on the GSoC14 GR page if it is not already there ... who knows, I might be willing to mentor :)  But, I'd like to see some papers / research first, as I'm sure others would too. - MLD

On Feb 20, 2014, at 8:04 AM, YiZiRui Zhou <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks for your patient reply. Your words really inspire me.
>
> I am writing a block to implement MIMO transceiver based on "ofdm_rx" and "ofdm_tx" now, willing to build a MIMO WLAN with several USRPs. Basically, general MIMO encoding and decoding method will be included, some techniques like rate adaptation is also in consideration. But those ideas are not so complete now, next I will try to figure it out. As you said, posting the idea on the list is a good way to make it known to all, I will do that when everything is ready. Also, I will go through the GNU Radio GSoC wiki page, maybe there are some other good things I can do.
>
> I know that if there is no mentor to guide me, I would not be able to take part in the GSoC. But, maybe this is not the most important thing to me. There is no doubt that I can benefit a lot from working on the project and learning from the mailing list, these are the things that shine.

Hi Michael,

Glad to hear from you.

To be frank, MIMO is not a novel thing, since it has been proposed for many years. In the past, most research on MIMO stay in theory due to the limitation of signal processing technology. But things are different now. Since 2009, when IEEE passed the 802.11n draft, study on practical MIMO surges. Now, it becomes more prevalent.

There are many research papers on MIMO, many of them are published in Mobicom or Sigcomm, which are all top conferences on Computer Network.

Among them, I think "802.11 with multiple antennas for dummies" is a good guide for someone who are not so familiar with practical MIMO systems. This is the link.

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~dhalperi/pubs/mimo_for_dummies.pdf

A paper "Rate adaptation for 802.11 multiuser mimo networks" implement MIMO with GNU Radio and USRP, but it focus on uplink transmission only. Also, the details on how to build MIMO systems with USRP is not illustrated, maybe you will be interested on how it works too. This is the link.

https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~gshyam/Papers/turborate.pdf

Other works are not list here for brevity. By the way, some studies on MIMO are based on Sora, another SDR platform.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/sora/

In my opinion, MIMO systems will be more ubiquitous in the future. But it seems that there is no relevant standard block (gr-mimo) to achieve this in GNU Radio yet. So I think maybe there is something I can do.

Best wishes.

Zhou