MIMOWA Project

Introduction

The MEDEA+ project MIMOWA simulates, implements, and evaluates wireless MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) building blocks (IP, Silicon, and FPGA content) for cellular 3G and LTE, WiMAX (fixed and mobile) and WiFi air interfaces. The project is partly funded by the EUREKA member states and the German National Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF).

The project started with MIMO system simulations, focusing on the design and the implementation of these building blocks and finished by validating and demonstrating the implementations. These demonstrations have two-fold ambitions:

• to explain the advantages of MIMO to a broad public
  
• to perform state of the art analysis of the real MIMO advantages.
  

MIMOWA will enhance European knowledge on MIMO system implementation. As this topic is and will become more and more important in wireless communications, MIMOWA will contribute to the strengthening of the European industry leadership.
Other foreseeable impact will be a reduction of the development cost for network and chips resulting in lowering the usage cost for the end user and enriching academic knowledge and the skills of the workforce, and improving competitiveness in the knowledge based economy.

The frame project runs 30 months, from January 2007 to June 2009 and the consortium includes leading companies from Belgium, Germany, Israel, Spain and Turkey, ranging from UE chipset manufacturers, infrastructure equipment manufacturers, network operators, research centers, and test equipment producers.

Today, the specification activities in work package (WP) 1 were completed by the partners. The development work in WP 2 was also finished.
The validation in WP 3 was completed and the interfaces between partners were agreed. The demonstrators were defined and built.
WP 4 concerning the further evolution delivered interesting results, summarized in the white paper "Proposal about Future MIMO Technologies".
Dissemination and standardisation was initiated in the project and is on-going.

MIMO is and still remains a hot topic in the wireless world. This can be seen through the quantity of conferences where MIMO sessions are organised. As example, the recent IST mobile summit, VTC, PIMRC, and other leading conferences included multiple sessions where MIMO topics were an important part of the presentations.
Furthermore the standardisation bodies in the three above mentioned air interfaces are more and more including MIMO schemes in order to improve throughput and QoS for the end-user.

The Contribution of AWE Communications

In the last few years multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which deploy spatially separated multiple antenna elements at both ends of the transmission link, have emerged as one of the most promising approaches for high data rate and more reliable wireless systems. It was shown that the MIMO channel capacity grows linearly with antenna pairs as long as the environment has sufficiently rich scatterers. According to this the capacity gains ultimately depend on the propagation channel in which the system is operating.  For attaining or at least approaching those capacities, sophisticated signal processing algorithms and coding strategies have been developed and corresponding research is on going. In order to assess the benefits and possible problems of these algorithms, realistic models of the wireless propagation channel are required. Hence, the establishment of good spatial channel models is essential both for the development of new algorithms for signal processing, modulation, coding, and for the unified testing of different system proposals in standardization.

AWE Communication's radio planning tool WinProp will be upgraded in MIMOWA towards the consideration of MIMO systems. The planning tool includes already ray-optical wave propagation models which process 3D vector data of buildings in order to determine the mobile radio channel within various environments (rural, urban, and indoor).

MIMO Radio Channel Data:

The extended tool shall allow the prediction of the radio channel in time, frequency, and spatial domains between each pair of the BS and MS antenna elements. Furthermore the ray tracing model shall be extended to consider arbitrary polarisation (Vertical-, horizontal-, cross-polarisation) which influences the transmission, reflection and diffraction coefficients (e.g. according to Fresnel coefficients and geometrical/uniform theory of diffraction (GTD/UTD)).

• Typical MIMO use case scenarios for the different systems (3G LTE, IEEE802.16e, IEEE802.11n) shall be defined, oriented at the well known scenarios from available standards (e.g. urban vehicular, indoor, i.e. environment with UE velocity). These scenarios will be considered for the derivation of typical MIMO channel data.
  

• The MIMO channel data as computed by the radio planning tool will be provided for further evaluation to interested partners (Agilent, Alcatel-Lucent, Alcatel RFS, CEA/Leti, Telefonica), e.g. to process the data in channel emulators for link and system level simulations. Therefore an appropriate interface shall be defined for the exhange of the MIMO channel data.

 
MIMO Performance Gain on System Level:

In order to consider the MIMO performance gain (data rate and/or SIR) in the WinProp radio planning tool (network planning module) a corresponding methodology shall be derived. Based on the evaluation of MIMO results from link level simulations carried out by other partners (for various interference levels) it will be possible to consider the MIMO effect on system level in an empirical way depending on the multi-user interference but also the antenna arrays (number of elements, spacing, geometry) and the channel properties (LOS/NLOS, angular spread, correlation).

Brochure about MIMO

Application note about ray tracing

Brochure about the urban propagation models. 

Brochure about the indoor propagation models. 

Read more about  MIMO

Read the publications of AWE Communications to MIMO

Read more about the 3D Urban Ray Tracing (IRT)

Read more about the 3D Indoor Ray Tracing (IRT)

Read the MIMOWA General White Paper

Proposals about Future MIMO Technologies