Antenna preselection for massive MIMO, multi-channel sounder concept, and fibre-fed test-bed, for 5G

The fifth generation (5G) of wireless connectivity is a global research effort for providing a significant jump in communications capacity. This will improve existing services for personal and business communications, navigation, media distribution, etc. New applications will include wearable terminals, smarter homes, better vehicular safety and other critical infrastructure, and products that are currently unimagined. The 5G capabilities include higher reliability and data rates with lower latency, realized through new technologies such as (i) massive MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) - meaning the use of a large or massively large number of antennas, and (ii) higher carrier frequencies – meaning tens to hundreds of GHz - in order to have physically smaller antennas. The massive MIMO is the most visible and compelling technology for 5G. The idea is to use arrays with a massive number of antenna elements for serving mobile terminals simultaneously. With 5G a cornerstone goal of current research in communications theory, radio-wave propagation, antennas, and electronics, new paradigms are being sought in many aspects of communications design and implementation. This particularly motivates a study of massive MIMO, with the aim of understanding and contributing to the knowledge pool for the communications performance expected from 5G. The breadth of technologies is too overwhelming to address within a single cover and so the following projects were selected and are presented in this thesis as contributions to 5G: (i) a signal processing algorithm for massive MIMO antenna selection combining, evaluated in a modelled, realistic propagation environment; (ii) a design concept for a distributed antenna channel sounder, demonstrated for magnitude-only indoor channel sounding; (iii) a MIMO test-bed for proof-of-concept demonstration of FPGA-based MIMO signal processing algorithms