This project will develop a state-of-the-art network testbed for facilitating research and development of emerging wireless technologies at centimeter-wave (cmW) and millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies, spanning 10GHz-300GHz. These technologies are the focus on intense current interest in both academia and industry as part of the emerging vision for 5G wireless standards and beyond for meeting the exploding data rate requirements imposed by proliferating mobile devices. It is widely recognized that current wireless networks operating below 6GHz simply do not have enough spectrum to sustain this growth and deliver the expected multi-Gigabit data rates. Multi-Gigabit speeds are possible in cmW/mmW due to the orders-of-magnitude larger available bandwidth compared to existing systems and the highly directional propagation through narrow beams. This project aims to exploit both features and will develop a versatile and powerful platform for integrated theoretical-experimental research on timely, critical and multi-faceted problems to advance the frontier of cmW/mmW technology. It will facilitate new collaborations with many researchers involved in cmW/mmW wireless, and also provide synergy with related advances in photonics, mixed signal circuits, and antennas. The testbed development will provide a unique teaching, learning and training opportunity for the students and faculty, spanning wireless communications, signal processing, networking, radio-frequency hardware and antenna design, FPGA (field programmable gate array) development, and system design, measurement, and troubleshooting. Five industrial and academic partners will contribute to the project. The PIs' plan to leverage the testbed for new curriculum development emphasizing interdisciplinary research and hands-on experience, and for outreach to middle and high schools. The testbed will also facilitate industrial-academic collaboration to accelerate the development of cmW/mmW technology and to enhance US leadership in 5G wireless and beyond.
The multi-beam multiple input multiple output (MB-MIMO) wireless testbed network being developed consists of four nodes that will serve as access points (APs) and six nodes that will serve as mobile stations (MSs) or clients. The AP nodes will enable wideband high-dimensional MIMO functionality supported by a novel antenna array and a new FPGA-based digital backend. A key feature of the testbed is that the AP nodes are equipped with a state-of-the-art physical (PHY) layer based on a novel continuous aperture phased (CAP) MIMO architecture for hybrid analog-digital wideband multi-beamforming. The testbed builds on the successful development of a 10GHz CAP-MIMO prototype for proof-of-concept, and a new recently developed 28GHz prototype with advanced functionality. The CAP-MIMO architecture exploits the expected channel sparsity in beamspace for performance-complexity optimization and enables a practical approach to achieving the critical capability of electronic multi-beam steering and data multiplexing. The testbed will also enable multi-beam wideband MIMO channel measurements at spatial resolutions that are critical to the development of cmW/mmW systems but unavailable at this time. It will open new research avenues in several areas, including channel measurement and modeling, PHY design, interaction between PHY and higher layers, and new use cases, such as sensing.
