A Scalable Implementation for Real-Time Phased Antenna Array mmWave Testbeds

In this paper, a software-defined radio(SDR)-based phased antenna array mmWave testbed is proposed and implemented. We first provide the underlying system model pertaining to the mmWave testbed. Then, details of the mmWave phased antenna array and the transceiver baseband signal processing procedure are deliberately illustrated. Non-uniform linear beam coding is adopted in the beam codebook design and over-theair experiments are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and validity. The results indicate that 6-bit phase shifter is sufficient for the 64QAM data transmission and phase noise resulted from the local oscillator can be neglected in our mmWave testbed. Besides, more attention should be paid to the phase quantization than the phase random error in the phased antenna array.