Massive MIMO

RF DSP’s Avalo Distributed Massive MIMO Development Platform: Baseband Massive MIMO Engine in the center, two RRU each with an array of 64 smart antennas for 3D MIMO. The system supports eight 64-antenna RRUs for a total of 512 antennas. Massive MIMO Engine of RF DSP’s Avalo Distributed Massive MIMO Development and Test Platform, capable of supporting baseband and massive MIMO beamforming processing of 512 distributed antennas.

A sample claim from our massive MIMO patent portfolio on power-saving in massive MIMO, a critical technical challenge and cost of operation issue:

A method of a Multi-User Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) Base Station (BS) to reduce power consumption comprising:

  • estimating, by the BS, a plurality of Radio Frequency (RF) circuit paths and antennas of the BS needed in a MU-MIMO system based on a number of User Equipment (UEs) selected for MIMO communication with the BS, Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) needed to support a desired modulation and coding scheme in the communication with the selected UEs, and estimation of the channels with the selected UEs;
  • determining, based on the estimated RF circuit paths and antennas, unused antennas and RF paths of the BS that are to be turned off;
  • turning off the unused antennas and RF paths to reduce power consumption; and performing MU-MIMO communication with the selected UEs using a sufficient number of connected RF paths and antennas of the BS.

RF DSP Inc. develops technologies and networking solutions to enable operators to cost effectively meet the high capacity, high density and high coverage consistency challenge in LTE-A and 5G. To support the development of massive MIMO technologies, we developed two generations of massive MIMO reference design and development platforms: the Avalo Distributed Massive MIMO Development Platform, and the 5G NR Wideband Massive MIMO O-RU Reference Design. We are offering the platforms to the research and development community to accelerate the advancement of massive MIMO technology. Massive MIMO holds great promise but there are only very limited test results using hardware and over the air transmission to verify the large amount of theoretical and simulation studies.

5G NR Wideband Massive MIMO O-RU Reference Design. The platform supports 2x200Gbps of O-RAN fronthaul bandwidth, contains enough DSP power to perform 16 layers of MU-MIMO processing over 64T64R antennas. The platform is expandable to include Xeon server blades to integrated O-DU and O-RU in the same chassis.

Both Massive MIMO Platforms are open hardware reference, support multiple standard interfaces at different 3GPP split levels, 7.2x, 6 or higher. They can also be used to implement functions of massive MIMO channel emulator and massive MIMO UE testers that can test up to 32 UEs per resource block.