With the significant spread of 5G telecommunication systems, the demand for high quality of service and better coverage is growing rapidly. Multiple-input-multiple-output is planned to be among the key technologies in 5G telecommunication's field. In this article, a new fully digital 2×2 MIMO testbed is implemented, using USRP B210 and 2 pairs of microstrip antennas with 4 radiation elements. In this implementation we cover the reconfigurability of the USRP combined with MATLAB, providing flexible integration between real-time and software host processing.

Since the software‐defined radio digital beamforming (DBF) system is the newest tendency in fifth‐generation (5G) development and based on its flexibility applied to antenna arrays, this research paper presents a smart antenna array architecture operating in C‐band (3.48 GHz). In developing DBF for 5G access points with beamforming capacities, it is first necessary to perform an accurate approach that identifies the position of the desired user and affects the beamforming processing. In this article, a feasible approach is represented to evaluate and test three angle‐of‐arrival algorithms. To ensure the robustness of the system, the system structure with its four main components, the transmit subsystem, the synchronization subsystem, the receive subsystem, and data processing are described in detail. This article presents a reasonably inexpensive prototype DBF in conjunction with a Universal Software Radio Peripheral B210 board. Experimental measurements and results confirm the suggested methodology.