MIRABeam: Multi-beam Interference Robust Adaptive Beamforming

Nothing can grow exponentially forever, but wireless communication still seems to do so. Especially video and Cloud content increasingly produces huge wireless data streams to mobile phones and other multimedia devices, while new wireless applications come up, e.g. for the “Internet of Things”. All these wireless devices compete in using the scarce radio spectrum, and mutual interference is rapidly becoming a bottleneck, as 2.4GHz WiFi users already begin to experience. Improving the interference robustness of radio receivers is hence an important active field of research. In this project we explore the feasibility of new mixed analog-digital beamforming architectures. By analog pre-beamforming it is possible to cancel strong interference early in the receive chain to improve interference robustness. The actual beamforming is still done digitally to fully leverage digital signal processing benefits. Moreover, digital techniques will be used to smartly adapt both the beampattern of the transmitter and receiver. Overall, the target is to focus the transmit beam(s) in the most useful direction, both to reduce “interference footprint” and increase the data capacity per area, while nulling out the strongest interference in the receiver.