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An Advanced Hardware Platform to Verify 5G Wireless Communication Concepts

Conference Paper · May 2015

DOI: 10.1109/VTCSpring.2015.7145679

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Matthias Mehlhose Jens Pilz

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 An Advanced Hardware Platform
to verify 5G Wireless Communication Concepts
Thomas Wirth, Matthias Mehlhose, Jens Pilz, Ralf Lindstedt
Dennis Wieruch, Bernd Holfeld and Thomas Haustein
Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute, Einsteinufer 37, 10587 Berlin, Germany
Email: thomas.wirth@hhi.fraunhofer.de
Abstract—Verification of first 5G concepts of a new air inter-
face with real hardware prototypes is challenging. In this paper,
we highlight a flexible software-defined radio (SDR) platform,
which can be used to implement novel 5G communication
concepts. The proposed software and hardware architecture was
previously used to implement early LTE-Advanced features, e.g.
flexible multi-band carrier-aggregation (CA) and studies on new
multi-carrier waveforms. The proposed hardware setup allows
early proof-of-concepts (PoC) by extending hardware-in-the-
loop (HIL) experiments to small laboratory experiments and
finally real outdoor test trials of a novel 5G air interface and
concepts.
Index Terms—5G Prototyping, Remote Radio Unit, Novel Air
Interface, Software-defined Radio Platform
I. I NTRODUCTION
Current understanding of 5G directed research targets pri-
marily the next generation air interface, core network and
the underlying system architecture. While novel concepts
and mechanisms are being developed, there is an increasing
demand to demonstrate and evaluate key mechanisms with
real hardware. First experiments and lab tests will identify
challenges and highlight limitations. These lab tests will later
be extended to field trials while the technology is becoming
more mature. Since new transmission concepts with high com-
plexity are resource demanding, implementation on powerful
software-defined radio (SDR) platforms is a key for efficient
early prototyping and benchmarking.
In this paper, we will highlight the key challenges for pro-
totyping of the next generation mobile radio standard or 5G.
We will propose a very flexible and powerful SDR hardware
platform and illustrate exemplarily which forthcoming wireless
technology can be implemented on the proposed platform.
II. 5G C HALLENGES AND C ONCEPTS
A. 5G Use Cases and Requirements
The requirements currently being discussed for 5G are a
1000-times gain in capacity targeting very high data rates
of up to 10 Gbps. With the deployment of the Internet-of-
Things (IoT), the number of devices communicating with each
other will dramatically increase over the next years. With
these high capacity demands, service delivery for dense user
crowds and dense sensor systems will define 5G requirements.
This work was partially funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and
Research (BMBF) of Germany in the framework of the Cognitive Mobile
Radio (CoMoRa) project under support grant 16BU1200.
978-1-4799-8088-8/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
Furthermore, device-to-device communication as in smart grid
and the Industrial Internet will drive reliability and latency
requirements. Fast machine control loops and wireless emer-
gency stop functionality requires delays below 1 ms. With the
number of sensors increasing, the energy costs and efficiency
has to be revolutionized, such that a 10x longer battery life
can be achieved and the energy cost per bit is reduced by a
factor of 100 to a 1000-fold.
B. Key Concepts for 5G Prototyping
5G systems and subsystems will require the development
of a total new chip generation for signal processing of analog
and digital signals. Higher integration of analog and digital
circuits will make chips more power efficient with support for
more frequency bands as well as processing capabilities for
decoding. In addition, signal processing will handle increas-
ingly more bandwidth and interfaces between layers will scale
from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps inside the base stations and multiple
10 Gbps links which can realize 40-100 Gbps in total between
the base station network comprising fronthaul and backhaul
over fiber and suitable wireless extensions.
Furthermore cloud technology with scalable base band
signal processing platforms using off-the-shelf computer hard-
ware architectures will gradually take over more data and
signal-processing tasks currently performed on dedicated and
optimized processors primarily supporting PHY and MAC
functionalities of the wireless communication layers.
In the next subsections, we will highlight a selection of key
conceptual changes compared to current 4G settings, which
have to be addressed in 5G.
1) Flexible Digital Signal Processing: Beyond content
distribution and proliferation in closer proximity of the users,
flexibility in moving functions and signal processing capa-
bilities within the network requires substantial changes in
digital hardware architectures. Allowing more OSI stack layer
signal processing being performed at various sections of the
wireless network requires high-speed interfaces and protocol
termination at new endpoints. This flexible signal processing
can range from baseband signal processing pooling in C-
RAN fashion plus a powerful fronthaul network for distributed
remote radio units at the antenna locations, to fully distributed
in network processing types of wireless communication and
data processing supporting concepts like network coding and
compressed sensing techniques in a fully fledged way.
 2) Digital Hardware Interfaces: The above sketched vi-
sion for higher flexibility in placing and moving signal-
processing capabilities will allow more flexibility splitting
PHY and MAC signal processing chains enabling flexible
Fronthaul/Backhaul/X-Haul data rate and latency matching,
and the support of fundamental mechanisms like user- and
control-plane splitting allowing new types of data and signal
path settings across heterogeneous network topologies and air-
interfaces.
3) Analog and mixed signal processing: Bringing digital
signal processing closer to the antennas provides a new level
of signal processing substituting established analog control
loops and filters by digital representations in dedicated chips.
Such trends will allow to exploit novel and adapt estab-
lished concepts like Full-Duplex communication or digital pre-
distortion (DPD) in order to achieve e.g. diplex free multi-
band transmission, simultaneous FDD and TDD operation of
adjacent bands, coexistence of true dual wireless connectivity
of user terminals to the network or in direct mode with
other devices. These opportunities come along with new
challenges when it comes to very high numbers of antennas
to be jointly used for signal processing and/or when the
number of simultaneously communicating devices per area
increases significantly and requirements towards synchronicity
are very different compared to current single air-interface fully
synchronized approaches. Shrinking the many spectrum bands,
band combinations and many antenna components in size and
cost is a manufacturing challenge to be addressed when link
and systems performance gains are better understood.
4) Active Antennas MIMO: MIMO introduced in WiFI,
WiMAX and LTE is now moving from 8 antennas, via multiple
of 8 antennas, up to massive MIMO (MMIMO) setups with
hundreds of antennas. Since antenna panel size matters, the
number of active antenna elements will increase with higher
frequency making MMIMO technology an enabler for spatial
multiplexing in the classical IMT bands and a must for longer
range wireless communication links in the millimeter wave
spectrum to allow antenna gains from beamforming. A higher
flexibility of spectrum usage, enabled by key concepts like
LSA, see [1], allows to access and use a wide range of
frequencies. Here, frequency resources are aggregated using
secondary component carriers. LSA user terminals can either
handover to the newly aggregated spectrum or can be served
on primary and secondary carriers simultaneously. Allocation
of the particular frequency resources and bands depends on
which type of service has to be provided to the LSA user: Low
frequencies preferably selected for mobile and deep indoor
signal distribution or for building up large umbrella cells,
higher frequencies for lower mobility and shorter range, and
mmWave frequency for wireless back-/fronthaul as well as
short range communication by pushing access capacity in
mmW small cells into the multi-Gbps range.
5) Spectrum: Using frequency spectrum as efficient and
flexible as possible: Flexible spectrum usage in many bands,
below 6 GHz as well as above 6 GHz, e.g. in the sub-10
GHz range, the microwave band up to millimeter wave spec-
trum, e.g. 15/24/28/40/60/70/80/90 GHz and above including
licensed and unlicensed bands. A unified approach could be
realized using the LSA framework [2].
6) Licensed Shared Access: ASA/LSA is a novel way of
authorising spectrum currently without changing ownership, in
addition to licensed and license-exempt (unlicensed), see e.g.
EU RSPG: Report on collective use of spectrum (CUS) [3] and
ECC Report 205 on licensed shared access (LSA) adopted in
Feb 2014 [4]. The authorized shared access (ASA) concept as
initially introduced by NOKIA and Qualcomm in 2011 and
in the meantime referred to as licensed shared access (LSA)
in standardization and regulatory bodies. These mechanisms
have to be extended have to include more frequency bands
and band combination. Handset chipsets need enhancements
to detect interference from incumbent system. In addition,
the 5G protocol stack has to implement signaling channels
to dynamically adjust resource scheduling in the incumbent
zones.
7) Air-Interface and new Waveforms: Current discussions
on potential new 5G waveform candidates [5] are ongoing
taking into consideration that 5G will be beyond a next level of
link level data rates into the Gbps range. New waveforms have
to provide umbrella functionality for energy efficient sporadic
communication, high speed data downloads, very high number
of users per cell or area, multi-service operation using the
same or different wireless networks in adjacent or the same
spectrum. Challenges range from flexibility of radio resource
scalability, via robustness under coarse timing and frequency
synchronization, near far effects, neighbor channel crosstalk
to robustness against hardware impairments.
III. F LEXIBLE SDR H ARDWARE
Our software-defined radio (SDR) hardware prototype ap-
proach follows classical functional splitting into two key
components: a flexible RF-radio unit and a multi-core signal-
processing platform, see Fig. 1.
Fig. 1: Key components of SDR prototype: DSP-based signal
processing platform for baseband signal processing and RF-
radio unit connected via high-speed multi-gigabit interface.
A. RF Radio Unit
The radio unit supports various high-speed interfaces.
The implemented interfaces are Gigabit Ethernet (GbE),
optical common public radio interface (CPRI) running at
2457.6 Mbit/s over several km of fiber, as well as 10 GbE.
CPRI implements a high-speed bus to transmit 15-bit I/Q
samples between remote radio unit (RRU) and baseband signal
processing hardware. 1 Byte per I/Q data block is used to
transmit control and management (C&M) data. This allows
remote configuration of the RRU as well as reception of
measurement data such as automatic gain control (AGC)
values and received signal strength indicators (RSSI) for the
configured frequency band. The CPRI C&M channel allows
to change RRU settings on a LTE radioframe basis, e.g. every
10 ms. In this configuration, the RRU can be used as a
frequency scanning device. Finally, I/Q compression allows to
reduce I/Q data by a factor of 2 [6]. This enables support for
higher bandwidth, up to 40 MHz, or the use of more antennas,
e.g. 4x4 MIMO, using the same CPRI interface rates.
The clock concept for CPRI allows clock recovery on
the radio unit itself. Therefore, the RRU does not require
expensive oscillators itself. The clock signal is derived from
a high precision clock generated on the baseband card. This
allows remote configuration of several RRUs from the same
baseband card. For collocated RRUs, clock in- and outputs
can be used to synchronize several RRUs using master-slave
modes. The most important configuration parameters of the
RRU can be found in Tab. I. The basic schematic of the 4x4
RRU with 2 CPRI connectors is shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2: Block diagram of 2x2/4x4 SDR-RF: Stacked digital
and analog cards.
The latest version of the RF-radio unit is equipped with
8TRX and the latest Xilinx Zynq FPGA and complies to the
MicroTCA form factor. In addition, it allows aggregation and
synchronization of several 8-transceiver (8-TRx) MIMO cards
to support e.g. massive MIMO (MMIMO) antenna arrays with
64 antenna elements. The frequency can be tuned between
70 MHz and 6 GHz in FDD or TDD mode or to support
32 antenna elements operated in Full-Duplex mode supporting
beamforming at the same time. Furthermore, due to the
processing capability of the high performance FPGA and suffi-
cient memory, flexible PHY and MAC splitting options can be
implemented allowing optimal matching of backhaul/fronthaul
needs within the particular experimental setup.
B. Baseband Processing
The baseband card has two TIC6670 DSPs with high-speed
antenna interfaces (AIFs). Each DSP has 4 C66x cores and
2 GB of DDR3 memory. Furthermore, the DSP board has
a Spartan-6 FPGA which runs Linux to load firmware and
configure a variety of interfaces. It supports PCIe, SRIO,
No. Antennas 2 TRx or 4 TRx
(TRx = transceiver) extendable to 8 TRx
ADC / DAC 12-bit
Carrier Frequency Tunable: 70 MHz..6 GHz
Analog Bandwidth < 200 KHz .. 56 MHz
Noise Figure < 2.5 dB
Modulation QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM, 256-QAM
Frequency Duplex Mode FDD and TDD
Diplexing SAW or external cavity filters
Power Consumption < 30 Watts
Form Factor MicroTCA (single-width, full-height)
GbE over MicroTCA backplane
FGPA Xilinx Spartan-6 or Xilinx Zynq
Output power -8 dBm, external power amplification
with 20-30 dBm output power
depending on carrier frequency
TABLE I: Basic configuration parameter sets and versions of
the {2, 4, 8}-TRx RF-radio unit.
GbE as well as CPRI interfaces directly to both DSPs. GbE
and CPRI can be used via MicroTCA backplane or via
SFP modules on the frontpanel. In addition, this SDR board
implements a very flexible clock concepts with external clock
in- and outputs, a GPS, as well as a voltage controlled oven
oscillator (VCXO).
Beyond the currently used DSP platform for baseband
signal-processing, the RF-radio unit can be directly connected
via 40 Gbps Ethernet to a cloud-RAN capably multi-processor
unit, e.g. Intel server blade enabling aggregation of signal-
processing power into one unit for centralized processing
across signals transmitted/received by multiple RF-radio units.
IV. I MPLEMENTATION OF 5G C ONCEPTS
The SDR platform can be used to implement novel radio
systems with flexible frequency usage such as spectrum shar-
ing concepts or cross-layer scheduling, see [7]. Furthermore, it
can be used for PoCs of distributed antenna systems or novel
5G multi-MIMO systems cascading several 8-TRx radio units
towards massive MIMO (MMIMO). The SDR platform was
previously used to implement an licensed shared access (LSA)
user terminal as well as for transmission of arbitrary wave-
forms. Next, we will introduce the LSA concept and describe
two SDR use cases.
A. Flexible Spectrum Usage
Carrier aggregation (CA) is the key feature for licensed
shared access (LSA). The SDR prototype was used to im-
plement a CA mobile terminal (MT) which can aggregate up
to 4 continuous or non-continuous component carriers, each
with 2x2 MIMO and 20 MHz bandwidth. The peak throughput
on IP-layer of this MT is 600 Mbps and the SDR prototype
is depicted in Fig. 3. The software runs the real-time LTE
physical layer protocol implemented on the TI DSPs.

Fig. 3: Full SDR LTE mobile terminal for carrier aggrega-
tion (CA) or multi-MIMO implementation.
Fig. 4: Measurement result for LTE-A carrier aggregation with
3 component carriers, 20 MHz bandwidth, 2x2 MIMO for
continuous and non-continuous carrier aggregation realizing
sum rates of approx. 450 Mbps.
B. New Waveforms
The 5G SDR prototyping platform allows transmission
and reception of arbitrary waveforms. Waveforms can either
be generated in real-time, or recorded and stored on the
baseband platform or radio head itself. This mode allows
continuous playback of waveforms in a loop mode, as well
as online recording of over-the-air transmitted radio signals.
The received I/Q samples can be fully or partially decoded on
the baseband board or directly recorded via encapsulated bit-
stream to an external PC. The recorded bit streams can then
be processed offline using standard signal processing libraries.
This SDR prototype can transmit any waveform which
have been generated in a pre-defined standard I/Q format. In
particular, it can transmit any multicarrier signal, e.g. OFDMA,
SCFDMA, or filter-bank multicarrier (FBMC) signals. This
can be used to study various waveform characteristics, e.g.
adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) and pre-distortion
techniques, see Fig. 5. In addition, standard LTE control
signaling can be embedded into new waveforms, which allows
to study novel synchronization, equalization, and decoding
algorithms.
0
Power = -2.1 dBm OFDM Signal
FBMC Signal
-20
Power Spectral Density [dBm/kHz]
-40
ACLR (OFDM) = -43.5 dB ACLR (OFDM) = -43.3 dB
-60
ACLR (FBMC) = -61.2 dB ACLR (FBMC) = -60.3 dB
-80
-100
2620 2630 2640 2650 2660 2670 2680
Frequency Spectrum [MHz]
Fig. 5: Different waveforms and their adjacent channel leakage
ratio (ACLR) at 2.65 GHz measured using the SDR platform.
C. Massive MIMO
Key concept behind MMIMO is exploitation of directivity
of spatial signatures of user links allowing crosswise in-
terference nulling, which was first described in [8]. Recent
simulation studies show the gains of MMIMO in system-level
environments, see [9] and [10]. Similar to MIMO technology
10 years ago, many technical challenges have to be tackled for
successful early prototyping and proof-of-concept including
a wide range of systemic issues. These aspects include tight
synchronization of analog front-ends to support stable spatial
nulling, integration of antennas elements together with power
amplifiers, LNAs, diplex-filters, efficient channel estimation
for high number of antennas, TDD vs. FDD, full-duplex trans-
mission to avoid diplexers, efficient group antenna selection
for hybrid beamforming, frequency dependency and hardware
impairments measurement and compensation. Finally, form
factor and cost efficiency determine the feasibility of proto-
typing complex MMIMO systems.
Fig. 6 shows a MMIMO antenna array example designed for
the 3.6 GHz band which was recently setup at Heinrich Hertz
Institute. The antenna cube with 8x8 active antenna arrays on
3 sides is to be used for densely populated areas with moving
user clouds like e.g. train stations, shopping malls or trade
show scenarios.
Fig. 6: Massive MIMO (MMIMO) antenna cube with
10x10 antenna patches with 8 active antennas per column.
 Each 8x8 antenna patch array is currently being assembled
and uses 8 RF-radio units, one for each 8-antenna column.
After initial lab tests, the MMIMO unit will become an integral
part of the 5G Berlin testbed facilities proving an open 5G
research and over the air field trials facility [11].
V. C ONCLUSION
We gave an overview about use cases and requirements
of the forthcoming 5G wireless communication system. We
highlighted an advanced hardware platform which can be used
to prototype and verify novel 5G concepts. Furthermore, we
showed how the proposed prototyping platform based on a
software-defined radio (SDR) solution can be used to realize
advanced MMIMO systems with more than 32 or 64 antennas.
The key enabler to realize this is the advanced RF-unit, which
can be re-configured to a wide frequency range. Finally, the
proposed hardware platform has the required flexibility and
advanced processing power for 5G wireless prototyping.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank Andreas Forck, Hol-
ger Gäbler, and Kirsten Krüger for their contribution to the
hardware and firmware design as well as implementation of
key features on the radio unit.
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