In January this year, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine contained an article by Erik G. Larsson, Danyo Danev, Mikael Olofsson, and Simon Sörman on “Teaching the Principles of Massive MIMO: Exploring reciprocity-based multiuser MIMO beamforming using acoustic waves“. It describes an exciting approach to teach the basics of Massive MIMO communication by implementing the system acoustically, using loudspeaker elements instead of antennas. The fifth-year engineering students at Linköping University have performed such implementations in 2014, 2015, and 2016, in the form of a conceive-design-implement-operate (CDIO) project.
The article details the teaching principles and experiences that the teachers and students had from the 2015 edition of the CDIO-project. This was also described in a previous blog post. In the following video, the students describe and demonstrate the end-result of the 2016 edition of the project. The acoustic testbed is now truly massive, since 64 loudspeakers were used.
Really exciting project!
I wonder why you chose what sounds like a synthesized version of the songs. Surely, there are freely available versions? That would make it possible to hear how clean a signal one can get from the left and right arrays.
We weren’t able to obtain a very clear sound in this experiment (mainly because of some issues with the ADC cards, sampling frequencies etc). So synthetic “sinusoidal music” was good enough. But surely, future experimental work could focus on improving clarity of the sound and using real music.