High-throughput beamforming receiver for millimeter wave mobile communication

In this paper, we present a novel FPGA-based high-throughput beamforming MIMO receiver for millimeter wave mobile communication. With vast spectrum and small antenna element size, millimeter wave communication becomes very attractive and promising to support next generation mobile communication (5G). However, the high data rate requirement challenges both algorithm and architecture. In order to support the high data rate and to reduce the overhead of selecting the best beam pair, we propose a novel beamforming synchronization scheme more suitable for mobile communication. By further optimizing the algorithm and the architecture, we present a complete mobile receiver based on FPGA, which includes RF frontend, ADC, beamforming control, synchronization, channel estimator, soft MAP detector, and channel decoder. The design operates at 28 GHz carrier frequency with 500 MHz bandwidth. The throughput can reach 1.52 Gbps. We also performed the indoor and outdoor over-the-air transmission field tests. This work provides a platform for future millimeter wave mobile communication research.