A First Experimental Demonstration of Analog MIMO Radio-over-Copper
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Analog MIMO Radio-over-Copper is an effective fronthaul architecture that exploits pre-existing LAN cabling building infrastructures to provide enhanced indoor coverage. Although LAN cables contain 4 twisted-pairs with up to 500 MHz bandwidth/each over 200 m, today's commercial in-building solutions employ mainly the low frequency portion of LAN cable bandwidth, mostly due to the moderate cable attenuation and crosstalk among wire pairs. Several works proposed simulations that support the possibility to use LAN cables up to several hundreds of MHz. However, an experimental evaluation is still missing. In this letter, we demonstrate experimentally, and for the first time, the feasibility of the analog relaying of MIMO radio signals over LAN cables up to 400 MHz, thus efficiently exploiting the LAN cables transport capabilities for 5G indoor applications.
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