Experimental Test-Bed for Studying Multiple Antenna Beamforming over Ultra Wideband Channels up to 12 GHz

An experimental setup is designed and implemented to study the performance of transmit beamforming techniques over realistic UWB Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) configurations. This setup can be used to investigate practical issues which are not usually addressed in simulation models, such as imperfect channel estimation or coherency between the multiple transmitters. Our implementation is based on the use of optical delay lines to apply appropriate time shifts to the output of an electrical arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). In this paper we assess the experimental accuracy of our setup over a 4 × 1 MISO system using time reversal beamforming.