Empirical Comparison of Chirp and Multitones on Experimental UWB Software Defined Radar Prototype

This paper proposes and tests an approach for an unbiased study of radar waveforms' performances. Using the ultrawide band software defined radar prototype, the performances of Chirp and Multitones are compared in range profile and detection range. The architecture was implemented and has performances comparable to the state of the art in software defined radar prototypes. The experimental results are consistent with the simulations

A GPP-Based Software-Defined Radio Front-End for WLAN Standards

This paper presents a software-defined radio testbed for the physical layer of wireless LAN standards. All baseband physical layer functions have been successfully mapped on a Pentium 4 processor that performs these functions in real-time. This has been tested in combination with a CMOS integrated wideband analog front-end containing a low noise amplifier, downconversion mixers and filters. The testbed consists of both a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter contains a transmitter PC with a DAC board, an Agilent E4438C generator for upconversion and an antenna. The receiver consists of an antenna, a wideband SDR analog frontend and a receiver PC with an ADC board. On this testbed we have implemented two different types of standards, a continuous-phase-modulation based standard, Bluetooth and an OFDM based standard, HiperLAN/2. However, our testbed can easily be extended to other standards, because the only limitations in our testbed are the maximal channel bandwidth of 20 MHz, the dynamic range of the wideband SDR analog front-end and of course the processing capabilities of the used PC

An approach to achieve zero turnaround time in TDD operation on SDR front-end

Thanks to the digitization and softwarization of radio communication, the development cycle of new radio technologies can be significantly accelerated by prototyping on software-defined radio (SDR) platforms. However, a slow turnaround time (TT) of the front-end of an SDR for switching from receiving mode to transmitting mode or vice versa, are jeopardizing the prototyping of wireless protocols, standards, or systems with stringent latency requirements. In this paper, a novel solution called BaseBand processing unit operating in Half Duplex mode and analog Radio Frequency front-end operating in Full Duplex mode, BBHD-RFFD, is presented to reduce the TT on SDR. A prototype is realized on the widely adopted AD9361 radio frequency frontend to prove the validity of the proposed solution. Experiments unveil that for any type of application, the TT in time division duplex (TDD) operation mode can be reduced to zero by the BBHD-RFFD approach, with negligible impact on the communication system in terms of receiver sensitivity. The impact is measured for an in-house IEEE 802.15.4 compliant transceiver. When compared against the conventional TDD approach, only a 7.5-dB degradation is observed with the BBHD-RFFD approach. The measured sensitivity of -91 dBm is still well above the minimum level (i.e., -85 dBm at 2.4 GHz) defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 standard

Ultra-wideband SDR architecture for AMD RFSoCs and PYNQ based GNU Radio blocks

The AMD RFSoC (Radio Frequency System on Chip) architecture has gained significant attention within the Software Defined Radio (SDR) community for its integration of Radio Frequency (RF) frontend, FPGA fabric and Linux-capable Arm-based processing system in a single package. Despite its accessibility to researchers via the RFSoC 2x2 and RFSoC 4x2 development board platforms, its adoption within the GNU Radio community has been limited. This work demonstrates the potential of combining RFSoC with GNU Radio by utilizing a bidirectional QSFP network link to transmit and receive a wideband Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal. Using the remote procedure calls we are able to control the Tx/Rx center frequency and RFSoCs Digital Up/Down Converter (DUC/DDC) rates from the host PC to achieve runtime configurable bandwidth. Additional signal inspection and visualisation is implemented using existing GNU Radio GUI widgets and analysis blocks

Widely Tunable RF Frontend for the Universal Software Radio Peripheral: the MMP9000

This report presents the design and construction of a wideband transceiver in the context of an RF frontend for a software radio development platform, the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). This daughterboard is designed to operate at either full or half duplex modes over a frequency range of 100 MHz to 1.3 GHz or greater. It is fully integrated with both the USRP and GNU Radio, a free software radio development toolkit, to fully control the daughterboard via software