MIMO-RIC: RAN Intelligent Controller for MIMO xApps

The adoption of MIMO technology in wireless networks enhances spectral efficiency and enables novel functionalities such as wireless sensing and localization. These functionalities can be enabled by Open-RAN architecture to provide high computation, memory, and data-driven inference through a RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). However, existing RICs focus mainly on higher network layers and lack essential PHY layer functionalities for MIMO. We present MIMO-RIC, an open-source RAN intelligent controller tailored for MIMO applications. We enable the streaming of extensive 3D wireless channel measurements across antennas, subcarriers, and time, from RAN to MIMO-RIC to develop various MIMO apps like beamforming and localization. We implemented MIMO-RIC on the srsRAN open-source platform using ZeroMQ messaging system for efficient, low-latency communication. Our over-the-air experiment setup consisting of USRP radios and commercial user equipment demonstrates effective jammer monitoring, nulling, and user localization applications.