Mango Communications Team Presents Demo at ACM MobiCom 2014

Mango Communications presented a demonstration titled ​Real-Time MU-MIMO Channel Analysis with a Custom 802.11 Implementation at MobiCom 2014. The demonstration combined WARP v3 with the 802.11 Reference Design to let conference attendees use their own Wi-Fi clients to interact with the hardware and witness real-time changes in MU-MIMO channels. This demonstration is one of the many research applications enabled by the Mango Communications 802.11 Reference Design, an open-source, real-time FPGA implementation of the 802.11a/g MAC and PHY.

Demonstration Details

The demonstration consists of 5 WARP v3 nodes running the Mango 802.11 Reference Design:

• 1 is a standard AP serving Internet access to Wi-Fi clients. This AP implementation is identical to the Access Point implementation part of the 802.11 Reference Design release.
• 4 are quad-antenna monitors capturing per-subcarrier channel estimates for real-time analysis.

Conference attendees join the open AP with their personal Wi-Fi clients (e.g. smartphones/tablets) and use the AP to access the Internet. Once the association process with the AP is complete, the 16-antenna array of WARP boards begins to overhear transmissions from the conference attendees' Wi-Fi clients. The OFDM Receiver in each array element's PHY automatically estimates the channel between the conference attendees' devices and itself. These channels are learned via the two LTS symbols in the preamble of every transmission from the Wi-Fi clients.

• Custom Python framework coordinates runtime configuration of each node
• Custom PC application displays real-time channel estimates and SU/MU-MIMO achievable rates
• Full 802.11 MAC/PHY source available at ​http://warpproject.org/802.11

All code used in the demonstration corresponds to SVN revision 3857

Conference handout: PDF (660 kB)

Photos from the Demo Floor

Other Demonstrations Featuring WARP

In addition to the Mango team, two other groups gave demonstrations built on top of WARP.

(1)	(2)

(1) ​Co-primary Spectrum Sharing with Inter-Operator D2D Trial - Markku Jokinen , Marko Mäkeläinen, Tuomo Hänninen (University of Oulu)

(2) ​An Open-Source Development Platform for Long-Range UHF-Connected WiFi Hotspots - Ryan E. Guerra, Narendra Anand, Edward W. Knightly (Rice University)