An 88 FPGA-based MIMO-OFDM Real-Time

Transmission Testbed: OGNO Implementation and

Experimental Results
Yang Lan, Zhan Zhang and Hidetoshi Kayama
DOCOMO Beijing Communications Laboratories Co., Ltd, China
Emaillan@docomolabs-beijing.com.cn

AbstractHardware testbeds are an essential tool to evaluate the
performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems
in a realistic environment. However, most of the existing MIMO
transmission testbeds have been conducted under less than or
equal to four antennas. An 88 field programmable gate arrays
(FGPA)-based MIMO-orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) real-time transmission testbed has been
developed by the DOCOMO Beijing Labs (DBL) in a typical
indoor environment. Our objective is twofold: 1) to validate the
functionality of MIMO and OFDM technologies; 2) meanwhile,
to verify our receiver detection algorithm orthogonal
grouping-based near optimal detection algorithm (OGNO),
proposed for high order MIMO systems. This paper presents a
description of the testbed, detailing the testbed architecture,
algorithms interest and hardware components. Moreover, we also
present measurement results and show the impact of spatial
correlation on system performance.
Keywords-MIMO, OFDM, Testbed
I. INTRODUCTION
Information theoretic analysis shows that multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) systems can yield significant
capacity improvement when rich scattering environment is
properly exploited [1][2]. The combination of the MIMO
techniques with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) for broadband systems is seen as a promising basis
for next-generation high data rate wireless systems [3]. As an
essential tool, hardware platforms and testbeds are capable to
evaluate the performance of MIMO-OFDM systems in
realistic scenarios. After years of extensive theoretical studies,
current literature shows quite an extensive number of MIMO
testbeds.
In [4], a 44 MIMO prototyping testbed has been
developed by a research team at Brigham Young University.
This testbed uses fixed point digital signal processing (DSP)
microprocessor development boards for both the transmitter &
receiver stations. As the data source, a computer generates the
four data streams and passes the sampled signals to the DSP
board. The RF channel emulators are employed to model
fading channels such as Rayleigh, Ricean, and Nakagami.
Channel estimation and data detection are performed by a
computer at the receiver station. In [5] and [6], the authors
have reported a 33 testbed MIMO testbed and a real-time
22 space-time coding MIMO testbed. Similar to our testbed,
OFDM technology was used to build a 22 wideband MIMO
channel system in [7] and [8]. Another 22 testbed has been
developed by Rice University in Texas [9]. The testbed is
based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Another
44 testbed developed by the University of Bristol [10]
operates at 5 GHz and uses a DPS micropercessor
development board for the baseband processing. Similar to our
testbed, each transmitter has a preamble orthogonal to all
others and the channel state information is obtained at the
receiver. But this testbed does not allow real-time transmission
since the synchronization is done offline.
These testbeds mentioned above have been conducted under
less than eight antennas. In the future 4G standard, to match
the traffic demand and the higher peak data rates,
LTE-Advanced needs the high order MIMO transmissions (up
to 8 antennas) [11][12]. This paper describes the design and
development of an 88 MIMO-OFDM real-time transmission
testbed. It operates at 2.35GHz with a RF bandwidth of
6.25MHz. FPGA boards are used for processing baseband
signal. Upconversion to RF is performed with eight RF vector
signal generators (Agilent E4438C). Downconversion was
performed by eight signal analyzers (Agilent N9020A MXA).
At present, it employs 16-QAM signal modulation and the
multiplexing transmission scheme. The platform offers the
verification of the proposed signal detection algorithm in [13].
Meanwhile, we also provide the measured bit error rate (BER)
versus signal to noise ratio (SNR) curves in indoor MIMO
propagation environment.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
the detection algorithm is briefly introduced. FPGA-based
testbed architecture is presented in Section III. The
measurement results are given in Section IV. Finally, Section
VI concludes the paper. Throughout this paper, superscript T
and H stand for matrix or vector transpose and Hermitian
transpose respectively. Vectors and matrices are represented
using bold fonts while scalars in italics.
II. RECEIVER DETECTION ALGORITHM DESCRIPTION

Fig.1. 8h8 MIMO-OFDM system
lCSP2010 Proceedings

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978-1-4244-5900-1/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

In this section, a brief overview of the 88 MIMO-OFDM
system with the proposed detection algorithm is given. Fig.1
depicts the system structure, where the data stream is
multiplexed into 8 parallel independent OFDM modulated
data substreams, which are then transmitted by 8 transmit
antennas simultaneously. At the receiver side, first the cyclic
prefix (CP) is removed. After FFT operation, the received
signal is converted into the frequency domain. Let h
i,j
(k) be the
channel gain from transmit antenna i to receive antenna j at
the kth frequency bin. The MIMO channel matrix at the kth
frequency bin can be represented by

| |
T
T
k h k h k h
k h k h k h
k h k h k h
k k k k
(
(
(
(
(

= =
) ( ) ( ) (
) ( ) ( ) (
) ( ) ( ) (
) ( ) ( ) ( ) (
8 , 8 2 , 8 1 , 8
8 , 2 2 , 2 1 , 2
8 , 1 2 , 1 1 , 1
8 2 1

h h h H
, (1)
where h
j
) (k is the 81 column vector of channel gains
associated with receive antenna j. The symbol from the ith
transmit antenna is denoted as s
i
(k) at the kth frequency bin,
and the corresponding transmit symbol vector as
| |
T
k s k s k s k ) ( , ), ( ), ( ) (
8 2 1
= s . The additive white Gaussian
noise vector is n with variance o
2
. Therefore, the received
signal in the frequency domain can be expressed as,

| | ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( , ), ( ), ( ) (
8 2 1
k k k k y k y k y k
T
n s H y + = = . (2)

As the optimal decoding algorithm, Maximum Likelihood
Decision (MLD) rule is defined as

) || ) ( ) ( ) ( (|| min arg ) (
2
) (
k k k k
k
s H y s
s
=
O e
, (3)

where O includes all Q
8
possible candidate sequences. Q is the
modulation set size and || . || denotes the Euclidean norm. The
MLD requires an exhaustive search over Q
8
candidates to find
the optimal solution. Therefore, although MLD is optimal in
the sense of minimization of bit error rate, it is impractical as
its complexity increases with the number of transmitter
antennas, especially for high order MIMO systems. To reduce
the complexity of MLD, in [13], we proposed a new detection
method called orthogonal grouping-based near optimal
detection algorithm (OGNO) for high order MIMO systems.
The OGNO uses orthogonal grouping to convert a high order
MIMO system into several lower order MIMO systems, where
each subsystem can be viewed as one group. Using the
detection algorithm, near-ML dynamic-layer-ordering M-paths
(DOM) in [14], each group performs detection independently
and outputs several candidate sequences having different
reliabilities. At the last step, the overall optimal sequence is
obtained through ranking combination static group search. The
brief overview of OGNO steps in detail is given in Table I. For
more details, readers are referred to the previous paper [13].

Step 1.
Orthogonal
grouping
1-1. For simplicity in this illustration, we assume
N (8) transmit antennas and N receive antennas.
Define G as the group number and K the stream
number for each group. The subchannel matrix
is | | G g
gK K g g
,..., 1
1 ) 1 (
= =
+
h h H .
1-2. Define | |
G g g g
H H H H H
1 1 1 +
= . QRD
gets
g g
H
g
H R Q = .
1-3.
g
V is the matrix includes from the row N-K+1
to N of
g
Q .
| |
g g g g g
g g g g
n s H n s 0 H 0
n V Hs V y V y
~
~
~
~
~
+ = + =
+ = =
,
where
g g g
H V H =
~
is a KK equivalent channel
matrix and
g
n
~
is still AWGN.
Step 2.
Group
detection
2-1. Define
g g
H
g
H R Q
~ ~ ~
= . Then we have
gq g g g g g g g g g q
g
n s R n Q s H Q y Q y
~
~
~
~ ~ ~
~
~
~
+ = + = = ,
As the group detection algorithm, DOM outputs L
candidate sequences
| |
2
1
~
~
min arg
g g gq gL g
g
s R y s s
s
=
O e
.
Step 3.
Ranking
combinatio
n static
group
search
3-1. After step 2, each group generates L candidate
sequences. Therefore, there are L
G
sequence
combinations in total. To obtain the final estimate
sequence, a ranking combination static group search
with the reliabilities for the optimal combination
needs to be performed.
TABLE I. Overview of OGNO steps
III. FPGA-BASED TESTBED ARCHITECTURE
Using FPGA boards, we implemented the detection
algorithm OGNO described above into the 88 MIMO-OFDM
real-time transmission testbed. FPGA is reconfigurable and
hence suitable for the rapid prototyping of MIMO
transmission schemes. The testbed system includes a
transmitter and a receiver each including 8 antennas connected
to an RF front end flowed by an up or down converter to
intermediate frequency model. Meanwhile, filters are used to
minimize noise before processing of an IF signal. To prevent
magnetic wave from reaching areas where they would cause
magnetic interference, we have built up a magnetic shielding
room, which is a 12 m 6.7 m2.7m room with metal floor,
ceiling, and walls. It provides an effective shielding for our
equipments from ambient electromagnetic interference. The
antenna shown in Fig. 2 has dimensions 10mm20mm and
omnidirectional properties. The element spacing of the
antenna array is adjustable from 0.5 to 4.

Fig.2. Antenna dimension

FFT size 1024
Number of used subcarrier 896
Frame length 32 symbols
Number of transmitter antenna 8
Number of receiver antenna 8
Synchronization Perfect
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Guard Interval 15.36s (96 samples)
OFDM Symbol Duration 163.84s (1024 samples)
TABLE II. System parameters

Fig.3 illustrates the testbed transmitter, which consists of
some models. 1): Channel coding. It is implemented in the
Xilinx VHS-AD-SX55 FPGA, which includes 8 14-bit
digital-to-analog converters (DACs), and 8 14-bit
analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). One FPGA, clocked at
50MHz. 2): Two same FPGAs are for frame generation. One
frame consists of 32 OFDM symbols. The first symbol is for
AGC and the second and third symbols are for
synchronization. 8 OFDM preambles are for channel
estimation and 21 OFDM data symbols.
The upconversion from the IF frequency of 300 MHz to the
carrier RF frequency of 2.385 GHz is performed by 8 Agilent
E4438C signal generators and the signals are then transmitted
through 8 dipole antennas. Because there are 8 signal
generators, the carrier coherency is an important problem. In
order to achieve carrier coherency, equipment called
Distribution Amplifier Z5623A K05 is used. With 1 RF input
and 8 RF outputs, it enables up to eight signal generators to
operate in a phase locked and coherent mode at a common
frequency. This will yield carrier coherency from 50 MHz to
4.0 GHz. The distribution amplifier takes an oscillator signal
from signal generator one, called master signal source,
amplifies it and distributes it to multiple other slave signal
sources.

Fig.3. Testbed transmitter
Fig.4 shows the schematic diagram of the testbed receiver.
At receiver, eight signal analyzers perform as downconverters
to convert the RF signals to the IF of 300 MHz. The 8
downconverts employ a common local oscillator of frequency
2350 MHz, in this way there exists a perfect carrier frequency
synchronism at the receiver side. The AD converters sampling
frequency is set at 80 MHz in order to obtain a 6.25 MHz
replica. For each of the eight data paths, the samples are
digitally downconverted into an inphase (I) and a quadrature
(Q) component. The receiver baseband signal processing
mainly contains FFT transformation, channel estimation, QR
decomposition, group detection and ranking combination
static group search.

Modules Data format (b
D
.b
F
)
FFT input (16.15)
FFT output (16.15)
CIR estimation coefficients (16.15)
Digital I & Q output (16.15)
QR decomposition output (16.14)
Matrix Multiplication (16.15)

TABLE III: Summary of fixed-point data format precision at the receiver
FPGA-based implementation allows the use of a
customized fixed-point hardware definition wherein each
coefficient and each state variable may be represented using a
different number of bits. The fixed-point format we used is
16-bit word-length representation. b
F
indicates fractional bits
and b
D
represents fractional bits plus sign bit. The resolution
of the different variables is summarized in Table III.

Fig.4 Testbed receiver

IV. MEASUREMENTS
Parameters Values
Carrier frequency 2.35~2.6 GHz
MIMO configuration 88
MIMO mode Spatial Multiplexing
Detection scheme OGNO +DOM
Transmission scheme OFDM
Data modulation 16QAM
Channel coding
1): No coding
2): 1/2 Turbo coding
Peak spectral efficiency
(with coding)
10 bps/Hz
Peak data rate
(with coding)
50Mbps
Signal bandwidth 5 MHz
Maximum clock cycle 50 MHz
TABLE VI. Testbed specification

The layout of the measurement scenario is depicted in Fig. 5.
The transmitter is located in one corner of the lab room and
the receiver is put in another corner diagonally across the
room.


Fig. 5 Demonstration scenario for BER measurements
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In order to check the impact of antenna spacing on the BER
performance, we set the different antenna spacing.
Case 1: Firstly, the Tx and Rx antenna array with element
spacing 4 was set at both the transmitter and receiver sides.

Case 2: 8 elements are divided 4 groups. For each group the
element spacing is 4 and 4 for group spacing at both the
transmitter and receiver sides.

Case 3: the Tx and Rx antenna array with element spacing
0.5 was set at both the transmitter and receiver sides.
. . .

Fig.6 presents the performance comparison of measured
uncoded BER versus measured SNR. As a lower bound, the
theoretical optimal performance is showed. These results have
been measured for a 16QAM constellation and no coding used,
which corresponds a peak data rate of 100 Mbps. The trend
curves are obtained by averaging over these scattered
measured results. Wee can observe:
1): As expected, the red curve representing the BER
performance with the antennas spacing of 4 has the best
performance among three cases.
2): Compared to the optimal performance, there is around
3dB performance loss at the BER of 10
-3
. These factors that
affect the real measurement results in hardware consist of
these channel estimation error, QR decomposition error and
the fixed point roundoff error.
3): At the BER of 10
-3
, there is around 3.5dB performance
loss between case 1 and 2 and the performance gap is 4dB
between case 2 and 3, which means spatial correlation does
cause the performance loss.
4): Although the complexity of MMSE is low, the
performance far inferior to the proposed detection algorithm.

V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, an 88 FPGA-based MIMO-OFDM real-time
transmission testbed has been presented. The baseband digital
signal processing is based on a novel MIMO detection
algorithm: OGNO, which is able to detect eight spatially
multiplexed data streams. We present the implementation
architecture of this detection algorithm. Using this testbed,
future transmission schemes based on 88 spatial multiplexing
systems can be tested and evaluated. Using the testbed, a
measurement was performed in an indoor propagation
environment. The experimental observations reveal the impact
of spatial correlation on system performance.
-5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
10
-4
10
-3
10
-2
10
-1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R

Fig. 6 Performance comparison of measured BER versus measured SNR
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