Hi all,
I am a graduate student at Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany, majoring in signal processing for wireless communication. I am originally form India and did my bachelors there. I haven't heard about GNU Radio until a few months back and I regret for that, as I had more time in my undergrad and now graduate study is quite intense.
But still I managed to play with GR for few months now and also trying to build a block for carrier sync for OQPSK signals.
I saw MIMO transceiver idea in the GSoCOldIdeas page and I found it interesting and it suits me. I have done projects on solving problems in MIMO networks but the works were purely theoretical and simulation based. So I am eager to try out MIMO stuffs with hardware. As mentioned in the idea, I too feel that it would be nice for beginners to enjoy the effect of MIMO practically for a better understanding of the subject. So a standard gr-mimo module with a simple MRC decoder and a multi user beamforming encoder would do the job.
I further saw some discussion in the mailing list from 2014 regarding the same idea, and there were concerns (by Micheal Dickens) about the feasibility and practical difficulties in implementation as 3 months would not be sufficient. I am a bit confused as I think 3 months would be sufficient to implement the stuffs mentioned in the idea, or may be I am missing something here. I even saw Alick Zhoa and some others saying that they had already implemented 2x2 MIMO system in GR without OFDM but might have got obsolete.
However it has been few years since then and I hope someone could give more insight on implementing a practical MIMO transceiver and difficulties in it.
So my concerns are
- I would be glad if someone could explain the possible difficulties in implementing a practical 2x2 MIMO system in GNU Radio and with USRPs
- Considering the difficulties, is it doable in a span of 3 months?
- If someone had already worked on similar stuffs, their help would be appreciated.
- Will the standard MIMO module (gr-mimo) be really beneficial to the project? If not, I would rather work on it at my leisure than for GSoC as the idea would be less likely to be accepted.
Regarding the hardware, my university laboratory has several USRPs and I can use them.
Best regards,
Sakthivel Velumani