Programmable 28GHz mmWave MU-MIMO Testbed

Despite recent advancements in millimeter-wave (mm Wave) communication systems, the practical validation of research ideas in this field is still challenging. This is mostly due to the simplifying assumptions in their system modeling and overlooking hardware limitations in the simulation environment. In this paper, we propose a high-speed and programmable mm Wave testbed with multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming capability. The baseband signal processing is preformed fully on a general-purpose processor. The radio frequency (RF) frontend holds a hybrid MIMO architecture, where each RF chain is connected to one phased-array antenna. The testbed allows to plug and play different physical layer signal processing algorithms or radio resource allocation techniques, including machine learning models, to assess their performance under real-life conditions.