ArgosV2: A Flexible Many-Antenna Research Platform

Many-antenna base stations are a rapidly growing field in wireless research. A plethora of new theoretical techniques have been recently proposed for many-antenna base stations and networks. However, without experimental validation, it is difficult or impossible to predict the practicality and per-formance of these techniques in real hardware, under com-plex, rapidly varying, real-world conditions. Indeed, there is a significant demand for a flexible many-antenna research platform which supports rapid prototyping and validation of new massive-MIMO techniques. Leveraging our experience building Argos, a 64-antenna base station prototype, we have designed and built ArgosV2, a compact, powerful, and scalable many-antenna research platform based on WARP. In addition to the physical hard-ware and mechanical design, we are developing a software framework, ArgosLab, which will provide synchronization and channel estimation, greatly reducing the development effort for a wide range of massive-MIMO techniques. Ar-gosV2 is intended to provide ultimate scalability and pro-grammability for experimental massive-MIMO research. The modular architecture and real-time capability of ArgosV2 can support up to 100s of base station antennas and 10s of users with streaming applications. We present a 96-antenna base station which supports real-time streaming applications to 32 users simultaneously. 1