A real-time MIMO-OFDM mobile WiMAX receiver: architecture, design and FPGA implementation

Abstract

The IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard, also denoted as mobile WiMAX, was introduced as one of the first real efforts towards the deployment of fourth generation communication systems providing fixed and mobile broadband wireless access. Mobile WiMAX supports multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna techniques which are considered a key technology in wireless communication systems for increasing both data rates and system performance. This paper presents a real-time 2 x 2 MIMO mobile WiMAX receiver with a detailed description of the architecture, design and implementation steps. The complexity of the real-time baseband signal processing has been scaled-up due to the high channel bandwidth that was adopted. Numerous equipment and instrumentation comprising our high performance experimental MIMO testbed were used to validate the operation of the mobile WiMAX receiver. The paper includes a subset of results that demonstrate the system-performance using standard 2 x 2 MIMO mobile channels.