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.