MIMONet is a project that deals with the application of MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) communication to networks with multiple nodes.A key premise of the project is that MIMO Networks can leverage the diversity, spatial multiplexing, and interference cancelation capabilities of MIMO communication to provide higher network performance.

To date, MIMO technology has been successfully employed to improve the performance of point-to-point communications, e.g., communications between a client and the wireless AP.

Exploiting MIMO technology at the network-level is an especially challenging problem, which requires considerable, multi-disciplinary efforts from the modeling, algorithmic, analytical, simulative, as well as implementation point of view. For this reason, the MimoNet project proposes undertaking frontier, multi-disciplinary research activities of ground-breaking nature.

The specific MimoNet goals are:

  1. designing a suite of protocols for efficient network-level exploitation of MIMO communication technology; the designed protocols will span the MAC, and PHY layer, and account also for network-level issues, with a cross-layer approach;
  2. extending the design of state-of-the-art network simulators to enable relatively accurate and reasonably fast performance estimation of medium/large scale (up to a few hundreds of nodes) networks equipped with MIMO technology. The extended network simulator will constitute a fundamental tool to support optimal tuning of the designed protocols under different operational scenarios.
  3. carefully estimating protocols performance in selected application scenarios, in a variety of situations for what concerns radio environment (e.g., outdoor urban, free space, indoor, etc.), the density of wireless devices (e.g., interference-limited vs. coverage-limited channels), and so on. Performance estimation will be done both analytically (when possible), and through extensive simulation using the extended network simulator developed in the first stages of the project.
  4. implementing a representative subset of the designed suite of protocols into a small scale testbed (around 10 mesh routes). The main purpose of the small-scale testbed is providing a proof-of-concept and assess the viability of the proposed solutions.
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ICT