NI and Lund University announce massive MIMO collaboration

Massive MIMO is a relatively new concept in 5G communications and addresses capacity and energy challenges facing next-generation communication systems. This commitment from Lund University and NI toward the development of a massive MIMO test bed represents an ambitious collaboration. With more than 100 antennas, this prototype is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, making it the first test bed to reach this level of magnitude and complexity on the road to 5G.

Ove Edfors and Fredrik Tufvesson, Lund University Researchers, state: "We are very pleased with the commitment that National Instruments has shown to our massive MIMO research and the test bed. Through this partnership, we believe that we will be able to deliver ground-breaking results that could significantly impact the definition of 5G networks of the future."

James Kimery, Director of RF and Communications Research at National Instruments, says: "At National Instruments, we believe that our PXI platform and our USRP software defined radio platform, combined with NI LabVIEW graphical system design software, are the perfect technologies to prototype such a system. Without these technologies, prototyping such a system would be impractical. We are excited to partner with Lund University on this project to research and evaluate the massive MIMO concept and to contribute to the 5G research effort."

Massive MIMO Overview

The concept of massive MIMO involves the deployment of base stations with very large-scale antenna arrays, encompassing perhaps hundreds of transceiver elements, to increase network capacity, improve reliability and reduce the overall transmitted power in a channel. Theoretically, the total transmitted power from the large antenna array would be less than the transmitted power of a single antenna serving a designated cell or region, while delivering the same or higher data rates. Massive MIMO has been the topic of many research papers, but no one has been able to test the concept in a real-world scenario of the scale proposed by Lund University and NI.

For more information on the massive multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) system and how National Instruments is collaborating with top wireless communications researchers - focused specifically on 5G - visit www.ni.com/5g.