Achieving high data rates in distributed MIMO systems

2013-07-30Long after MIMO communication has been proposed as a viable path around the rate limitations of point-to-point communication, realizing its most general forms remains an elusive goal. In today's Internet, there is a clear demand for enabling wireless transmissions at high data rates over the last hop, serving simultaneously multiple users from different access point locations. Current multiuser signal multiplexing schemes require that different access points coordinate their transmissions to the symbol and phase level, thus requiring the realization of a distributed MIMO system. In this thesis we describe the techniques used in creating such a system using over-the-air synchronization and present our experimental results. We emphasize particularly scalability in large deployments and discuss techniques for reducing synchronization overhead, while achieving high spectral reuse