NL-COMM: Enhanced Video Streaming via Advanced Non-Linear Processing

TL;DR

NL-COMM introduces a non-linear MIMO processing framework that enhances video streaming quality, reduces antenna requirements by half, and supports overloading factors of 400% in real-world wireless environments.

Contribution

This paper presents the first implementation of NL-COMM with commercial devices in a 3GPP environment, demonstrating significant improvements over linear methods.

Findings

Improved video stream quality with NL-COMM.

Halved the number of antennas needed compared to linear methods.

Achieved overloading factors of 400%.

Abstract

With video streaming now accounting for the majority of internet traffic, wireless networks face increasing demands, especially in densely populated areas where limited spectral resources are shared among many devices. While multi-user (MU)-MIMO technology aims to improve spectral efficiency by enabling concurrent transmissions over the same frequency and time resources, traditional linear processing methods fall short of fully utilizing available channel capacity. These methods require a substantial number of antennas and RF chains, to support a much smaller number of MIMO streams, leading to increased power consumption and operational costs, even when the supported streams are of low rate. In this demo, we present NL-COMM, an advanced non-linear MIMO processing framework, demonstrated for the first time with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) user equipment (UEs) in a fully 3GPP-compliant environment. In addition, also for the first time, the audience will compare and assess the quality of live, over-the-air video transmission from four concurrently transmitting UE devices, alternating between current state-of-the-art MIMO detection algorithms and NL-COMM. Key gains of NL-COMM include improved stream quality, halving the number of required base station antennas without compromising stream quality compared to linear approaches, as well as achieving antenna overloading factors of 400\%.