Student Projects
Contact Information
Competition Year: 2016
University: KTH
Team Members (with year of graduation): Adrián de Miguel Herráiz (2016)
Faculty Advisers: Cicek Cavdar (cavdar@kth.se)
Email Address: adrikayak1@gmail.com
Country: SE
Project Information
Title: CoMP-JT performance assessment over an indoor C-RAN testbed
Description: Practical verification of the throughput enhancement that CoMP-JT brings to a C-RAN based indoor LTE cellular network
Products:
- USRP-2943R, USRP-2953R, LabVIEW Communications 1.1 and LTE Application Framework 1.1
- Smarteq SmartDisk WLAN
The Challenge:
Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) is envisioned as one of the enabling technologies for the upcoming 5G cellular networks. It leverages coordination between different nodes in the network to jointly process transmitted and received signals, diminishing the inter-cell interference impact and therefore increasing the SINR. Nevertheless, the tight requirements that exploiting all the potential of CoMP imposes over the backhaul claim for a holistic redefinition of the cellular networks architecture.
C-RAN emerges as a candidate for such redefinition, centralizing the baseband processing of the base stations, eliminating the backhaul between them and enabling the implementation of advanced coordination schemes like CoMP.
Although great research effort has been made toward the development of CoMP, very few field trials have been carried out, even less making use of a C-RAN architecture and none of them in an indoor environment. As indoor scenarios are increasingly playing an important role in cellular networks, a field trial of CoMP in such an environment is of the utmost importance.
This proyect aims at the evaluation of the downlink throughput enhancement that the implementation of CoMP-JT can bring to a C-RAN based-indoor cellular network. To that end, an LTE cellular network is deployed over a C-RAN architecture by means of the National Instrumets SDR platform. A baseline scenario not featuring any coordination between eNBs and another scenario implementing CoMP-JT are deployed in order to be compared in terms of downlink throughput provided to their served users.
The Solution:
The LTE Application Framework has been modified in this project in order to support 2 eNBs and 2 UEs, with all the modifications that it implies (support for cell-IDs different from 0, implementation of new CRS sequences, changes on the time-frequency mappings etc.). The eNBs and UEs are implemented making use of an USRP-2953R and an USRP-2943R. Two configuration are deployed:
1. The first configuration implements a cooperative scheme known as CoMP-JT. In this configuration, both eNBs transmit to the same user at the same time in order to increase the SINR of the UE's received signal.
2. The second configuration does not implement any coordination scheme and both eNB transmit to their respective UEs at the same time. In this case a high interference scenario is created.
The throughput that the UEs perceive with both configurations are compared and the improvement that CoMP-JT brings to the system is unveiled.
The National Instruments SDR platform offers a very straight forward development environment. The LTE Application Framework provides the user with a functional PHY and MAC layers of LTE that enable a fast implementation of new algorithms like CoMP-JT. The graphical nature of LabVIEW eases the visualization of the different functional modules of LTE and makes the development a lot easier.
These two images show the modificated dashboard for the eNBs and UEs respectively:
The following images show the setup of the system.
Indoor eNBs
UE
The code is fully functional and evident enhancements in the throughput have already been observed.
The development time of this project has been 5 months.
Attach Poster
Poster included as attachment
