Compensation of Hardware Impairments in MATE, the Chalmers mmWave MIMO Testbed

The ever-growing demand for high data rates and the global bandwidth shortage has motivated the emergence of millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems. As a capable tool for studying the limitations and requirements of future mmWave MIMO communications, we have developed the MATE testbed at the Chalmers University of Technology [1]. This setup supports up to 16 transmitters and up to 9 receivers and it operates between 28-31 GHz providing 1 GHz analog bandwidth per transmitter or receiver. In the remainder of this paper, we briefly explain a number of most important hardware impairments which limit the performance of MATE and we describe the techniques we employ in order to compensate each impairment.