# RF Chain Reduction for MIMO Systems: A Hardware Prototype

## TL;DR

This paper presents a hardware prototype for RF chain reduction in MIMO systems using hybrid analog combining, demonstrating near-optimal channel estimation performance with fewer RF chains.

## Contribution

It introduces a hardware implementation of hybrid RF combining for MIMO, including an optimal design and experimental validation of channel estimation accuracy.

## Key findings

- Hardware prototype achieves near-optimal channel estimation.
- Analog combining reduces RF chains cost-effectively.
- Experimental results show minimal performance gap from full RF chain systems.

## Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) chain circuits play a major role in digital receiver architectures, allowing passband communication signals to be processed in baseband. When operating at high frequencies, these circuits tend to be costly. This increased cost imposes a major limitation on future multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication technologies. A common approach to mitigate the increased cost is to utilize hybrid architectures, in which the received signal is combined in analog into a lower dimension, thus reducing the number of RF chains. In this work we study the design and hardware implementation of hybrid architectures via minimizing channel estimation error. We first derive the optimal solution for complex-gain combiners and propose an alternating optimization algorithm for phase-shifter combiners. We then present a hardware prototype implementing analog combining for RF chain reduction. The prototype consists of a specially designed configurable combining board as well as a dedicated experimental setup. Our hardware prototype allows evaluating the effect of analog combining in MIMO systems using actual communication signals. The experimental study, which focuses on channel estimation accuracy in MIMO channels, demonstrates that using the proposed prototype, the achievable channel estimation performance is within a small gap in a statistical sense from that obtained using a costly receiver in which each antenna is connected to a dedicated RF chain.