MIMO for MATLAB: A Toolbox for Simulating MIMO Communication Systems

Abstract

We present MIMO FOR MATLAB (MFM), a toolbox for MATLAB that aims to simplify the simulation of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems research while facilitating reproducibility, consistency, and community-driven customization. MFM offers users an object-oriented solution for simulating a variety of MIMO systems including sub-6 GHz, massive MIMO, millimeter wave, and terahertz communication. Out-of-the-box, MFM supplies users with widely used channel and path loss models from academic literature and wireless standards; if a particular channel or path loss model is not provided by MFM, users can create custom models by following a few simple rules. The complexity and overhead associated with simulating networks of multiple devices can be significantly reduced with MFM versus raw MATLAB code, especially when users want to investigate various channel models, path loss models, precoding/combining schemes, or other system-level parameters. MFM's heavy-lifting to automatically collect and distribute channel state information, aggregate interference, and report performance metrics relieves users of otherwise tedious tasks and instills confidence and consistency in the results of simulation. The use-cases of MFM vary widely from networks of hundreds of devices; to simple point-to-point communication; to serving as a channel generator; to radar, sonar, and underwater acoustic communication.