Millimeter wave massive MIMO beamforming communication simulator design : a systematic approach

of the Thesis Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO beamforming communication simulator design: a systematic approach by Zhengnan Li Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering Northeastern University, July 2018 Dr. Kaushik R. Chowdhury, Advisor With the growth of data traffic demands, wireless network architectures that use traditional sub-6 GHz frequency bands are now reaching their capacities. Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a transformative paradigm given its potential to attain throughput that goes beyond several gigabits per second, with over 2-4GHz of bandwidth. However, it also incurs high levels of signal attenuation that raises challenges in connectivity with increasing distance. The relatively high pathloss can be mitigated via beamforming technique, where signal energy is directed towards a specific user or target by appropriately weighting the phases of the antenna elements. In addition, the comparatively small millimeter wavelength also allows practicability of employing massive antenna elements within a small surface area. Thus, so called ‘massive’ clusters of antenna elements are now possible. This thesis presents a systematic simulator design for mmWave-based network architectures, fulfilling the requirements of next generation of telecommunication (5G). In this thesis, a beamforming enabled massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) based physical (PHY) layer simulator design is proposed and implemented in MATLAB. It consists of IEEE 802.11ad standard compliant transceiver design, 3GPP TR 38.901 channel model, and beamforming performance evaluation platform. The simulator facilitates assessment of different beamforming algorithms, as well as Medium Access Control (MAC) layer design process. Along with the transceiver, a Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) selection mechanism is also proposed to guarantee timing and throughput requirements from upper layer. Packet Error Rate (PER) results of the transceiver is simulated with different Clustered Delay Line (CDL) profiles suggested by TR 38.901.