Paper Info
Title
BigStation: enabling scalable real-time signal processingin large mu-mimo systems
Abstract
Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) is the latest communication technology that promises to linearly increase the wireless capacity by deploying more antennas on access points (APs). However, the large number of MIMO antennas will generate a huge amount of digital signal samples in real time. This imposes a grand challenge on the AP design by multiplying the computation and the I/O requirements to process the digital samples. This paper presents BigStation, a scalable architecture that enables realtime signal processing in large-scale MIMO systems which may have tens or hundreds of antennas. Our strategy to scale is to extensively parallelize the MU-MIMO processing on many simple and low-cost commodity computing devices. Our design can incrementally support more antennas by proportionally adding more computing devices. To reduce the overall processing latency, which is a critical constraint for wireless communication, we parallelize the MU-MIMO processing with a distributed pipeline based on its computation and communication patterns. At each stage of the pipeline, we further use data partitioning and computation partitioning to increase the processing speed. As a proof of concept, we have built a BigStation prototype based on commodity PC servers and standard Ethernet switches. Our prototype employs 15 PC servers and can support real-time processing of 12 software radio antennas. Our results show that the BigStation architecture is able to scale to tens to hundreds of antennas. With 12 antennas, our BigStation prototype can increase wireless capacity by 6.8x with a low mean processing delay of 860μs. While this latency is not yet low enough for the 802.11 MAC, it already satisfies the real-time requirements of many existing wireless standards, e.g., LTE and WCDMA.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2486001.2486016
SIGCOMM
Keywords
Field
DocType
low mean processing delay,wireless capacity,realtime signal processing,real-time processing,overall processing latency,large mu-mimo system,processing speed,scalable real-time signal processingin,bigstation architecture,mu-mimo processing,existing wireless standard,bigstation prototype,mu mimo,software radio
Signal processing,Wireless,Multi-user MIMO,Digital signal,Computer security,Software-defined radio,Computer science,Server,Computer network,Embedded system,Processing delay,Commodity computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
43
4
0146-4833
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
36
1.41
12
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qing Yang1361.41
Xiaoxiao Li22539.86
Hongyi Yao319214.89
Ji Fang453538.62
Kun Tan5135098.64
Wenjun Hu62354124.48
Jiansong Zhang759648.98
Yongguang Zhang83461248.65