Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] (GSoC) MIMO stuff in GNU Radio

[Michael Dickens]

Hi Zhou - I think it would be great to see how far GNU Radio can be pushed with 
respect to MIMO processing.  With advances in both algorithms and multi-core 
CPU raw processing capabilities, the added computational requirements for MIMO 
might be realizable at some reasonable level (IIRC, they were not [for 
commodity processors] back in 2007-2009 when I looked into this last).  I agree 
that MIMO is in wireless networking's future; the big question is how much 
anyone can accomplish in a few month's work towards getting even a basic MIMO 
system working (within GNU Radio, in this case; but, really, any platform that 
does not already provide such capabilities).

Your paper / research links are fine, though there must be a few more which are 
more seminal works on "how to do practical MIMO" which are concise and basic.

SORA is a non-starter for many researchers; compare the number of papers on or 
using SORA to those using GNU Radio ...

The GR GSoC14 website is < 
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/GSoC > and I encourage you 
to add your proposal to the "Signal-Processing" section.  I think you should be 
concise yet complete and realistic in what you think you can accomplish in a 
few months of work on this topic -- for example, you're not going to be able to 
implement 802.11n but you can probably come up with some basic MIMO using OFDM 
PHY layer concepts which would prove useful and interesting (taking in multiple 
data streams, then using MIMO to do encoding, then Tx them to a receiver, which 
does Rx, decoding, and pushing out multiple data streams; with or without 
feedback).  MIMO can be very complicated, so I'd encourage you to keep the 
scope reasonable (yet truly MIMO).  Let me / the list know when your part is 
up. - MLD

On Feb 20, 2014, at 9:39 AM, YiZiRui Zhou <address@hidden> wrote:
> Glad to hear from you.
> 
> To be frank, MIMO is not a novel thing, since it has been proposed for many 
> years. In the past, most research on MIMO stay in theory due to the 
> limitation of signal processing technology. But things are different now. 
> Since 2009, when IEEE passed the 802.11n draft, study on practical MIMO 
> surges. Now, it becomes more prevalent. 
> 
> There are many research papers on MIMO, many of them are published in Mobicom 
> or Sigcomm, which are all top conferences on Computer Network.
> 
> Among them, I think "802.11 with multiple antennas for dummies" is a good 
> guide for someone who are not so familiar with practical MIMO systems. This 
> is the link.
> 
> http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~dhalperi/pubs/mimo_for_dummies.pdf
> 
> A paper "Rate adaptation for 802.11 multiuser mimo networks" implement MIMO 
> with GNU Radio and USRP, but it focus on uplink transmission only. Also, the 
> details on how to build MIMO systems with USRP is not illustrated, maybe you 
> will be interested on how it works too. This is the link.
> 
> https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~gshyam/Papers/turborate.pdf
> 
> Other works are not list here for brevity. By the way, some studies on MIMO 
> are based on Sora, another SDR platform.
> 
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/sora/
> 
> In my opinion, MIMO systems will be more ubiquitous in the future. But it 
> seems that there is no relevant standard block (gr-mimo) to achieve this in 
> GNU Radio yet. So I think maybe there is something I can do.