On the design of a broadband wireless MIMO-OFDM demonstrator

We present an experimental broadband wireless 4×4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) space-timeblock-coded (STBC) OFDM system based on an extension of the IEEE 802.11a/g physical layer (PHY) to multiple-antenna scenarios. In the RF section, a new custom, area-efficient, reduced component count architecture is proposed for the integration of multiple dual-band RF transceivers in a single-slot VME board. At the baseband level, we present the modifications introduced in the standard PHY specification in order to extend it to scenarios using transmit diversity. New parameter estimation approaches for multi-antenna systems are proposed and implemented in a DSP-based platform.