In many professional environments, there is a need for more robust wireless systems that can meet the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. While today reliable connectivity can only be achieved by wires, future critical applications demand wireless connectivity. To this end, a radically different radio architecture is needed, offered by cellfree massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO). With CF-mMIMO, radio access is evolving from a cell-centric to a user-centric architecture. It is enabled
by a massive number of distributed, interconnected access points (APs) that are coherently beaming radio signals to harden the radio channel and limit interference. This architecture is considered as the most promising 6G innovation, however, many fundamental cross-disciplinary research challenges need to be tackled to narrow the gap between the promise of the current theoretical concept and scalable and costeffective solutions with manageable complexity. In this project, 3 research teams from UGent and imec with complementary expertise and a strong theoretical, experimental and analog/digital technology background, aim to address key fundamental research challenges hindering the deployment of realistic CF-mMIMO solutions:
- Optimized fronthaul (FH) electronics for a serial multi-hop architecture
- Advanced low-MAC and PHY signal processing on constrained FH networks
- Multi-AP synchronization and self-calibration scheme
- Flexible open-design, end-to-end integration and validation in realistic scenarios
To strengthen the research activities, the project will offer a complete evaluation platform for follow-up research purposes, consisting of a set of hardware components (distributed nodes and centralized processing unit), pre-installed software/firmware (with full communication stack), documentation, visualization tools and support. This evaluation platform will enable exploration of early CF-mMIMO solutions for validating professional applications in real-life environments.