Promoted content: 5G wireless spectral efficiency using massive MIMO

“With the NI MIMO Prototyping System, we were able to alleviate some of the pain of this development through an integrated hardware and software platform.”

Paul Harris, University of Bristol

The challenge

By 2020, Cisco forecasts that 5.5 billion people will own mobile phones. In the United Kingdom alone, tens of millions of these mobile users will each consume 20 GB of data per month and use more than 25 different smart devices in their daily routines. Factor in data-hungry applications like 4K video, driverless vehicles, smart factories, and broadband access expanding to the most rural places on Earth, and it’s no surprise that today’s wireless networks cannot handle the rapidly approaching, hyper-connected future.

The solution

To address the unprecedented demand for increased data rates, expanded network capacity, and improved reliability, engineers and researchers at the University of Bristol and Lund University are using the NI Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) Prototyping System to rapidly innovate and advance 5G cellular networks to transform the future of wireless communications through massive MIMO techniques. The team has successfully demonstrated greater than 20X increases in bandwidth efficiency compared to current 4G cellular technologies, which opens up new, record-setting realms of possibility for 5G deployment sub-6 GHz bands.