Realization and MIMO-link measurements of a transmit module for spatial modulation

This paper describes the realization of a circuit that transmits a data stream, through spatial modulation in the 2.45 GHz frequency band. The development of the transmitter includes RF circuit design with components such as a PLL synthesizer, Tx-DAC and IQ-modulator. A microcontroller, integrated into the circuit and programmed in C, is at the heart of the system. In this hardware system, developed specifically for spatial modulation, data is BPSK modulated and transmitted through an RF switch connected to two antennas. It can differ for every symbol which antenna is used, according to an extra series of information bits that are to be transmitted. Here the number of the selected antenna encodes the extra information bit per symbol, which not only results in a doubling of the data rate but also realizes diversity. Spatial modulation allows these features with only a single hardware transmit chain, resulting in low-cost and low-complexity hardware. At the receiving side, the extra information bits are decoded by assessing the channel used for each symbol. This practical system has been thoroughly tested by means of different measuring campaigns. The measurement results show that spatial modulation is correctly demodulated at the receiving side and forms an effective way to realize affordable MIMO systems

Towards generic satellite payloads: software radio

Satellite payloads are becoming much more complex with the evolution towards multimedia applications. Moreover satellite lifetime increases while standard and services evolve faster, necessitating a hardware platform that can evolves for not developing new systems on each change. The same problem occurs in terrestrial systems like mobile networks and a foreseen solution is the software defined radio technology. In this paper we describe a way of introducing this concept at satellite level to offer to operators the required flexibility in the system. The digital functions enabling this technology, the hardware components implementing the functions and the reconfiguration processes are detailed. We show that elements of the software radio for satellites exist and that this concept is feasible

Symbol timing recovery for GMSK modulation based on squaring algorithm

A new all-digital symbol timing estimator for GMSK signals is proposed. It is based on the squaring algorithm and has a feedforward structure. Performance in AWGN channel is assessed by computer simulation, and is compared with the modified Cramer-Rao bound and other existing algorithms. The performance of the proposed estimator is shown to be close to that of ML algorithm.published_or_final_versio

Symbol timing recovery for generalized minimum shift keying modulations in software radio receiver

A new symbol timing estimator for generalized MSK signals is proposed. It is based on the squaring algorithm and has a feedforward structure. The proposed timing estimator is fully-digital and is suitable for implementation in software radios. The performance in AWGN channel is compared with the Modified Cramer-Rao bound and that of the ML algorithm. The proposed timing estimator is found to have a performance close to that of the ML algorithm, but with a lower implementation complexity.published_or_final_versio

FPGA implementation of digital timing recovery in software radio receiver

This paper describes an implementation of an all-digital timing recovery scheme. Squaring nonlinearity is employed to generate the timing estimate and an IIR is used to extract the spectral component at symbol rate. Hardware design is performed using VHDL and realized in FPGA. The whole design can be fitted into an Altera EPF1OK70 FPGA chip, with 95.5% utilization of logic elements and 22% utilization of memory bits. The implementation exploits features of FPGA, which enable easy implementation of look up table and variable data precision at different nodes.published_or_final_versio

Non-data-aided ML symbol timing estimation in MIMO correlated fading channels

In this paper, the non-data-aided (NDA) maximum likelihood (ML) symbol timing estimator in MIMO correlated channel is derived. It is found that the extended square nonlinearity estimator in [9] is just a special case of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the conditional Cramer-Rao bound (CCRB) and the modified Cramer-Rao bound (MCRB) are also established. Simulation results under different operating conditions (e.g., number of antennas and correlation between antennas) are given to assess the performances of the NDA ML estimator and it is found that the mean square errors (MSE)s of the NDA ML estimator i) are close to the CCRBs, but not the MCRBs; ii) are approximately independent of the number of transmit antennas; iii) are inversely proportional to the number of receive antennas and iv) correlation between antennas has little effect on the SE performance.published_or_final_versio

Digital dual-rate burst-mode receiver for 10G and 1G coexistence in optical access networks

A digital dual-rate burst-mode receiver, intended to support 10 and 1 Gb/s coexistence in optical access networks, is proposed and experimentally characterized. The receiver employs a standard DC-coupled photoreceiver followed by a 20 GS/s digitizer and the detection of the packet presence and line-rate is implemented in the digital domain. A polyphase, 2 samples-per-bit digital signal processing algorithm is then used for efficient clock and data recovery of the 10/1.25 Gb/s packets. The receiver performance is characterized in terms of sensitivity and dynamic range under burst-mode operation for 10/1.25 Gb/s intensity modulated data in terms of both the packet error rate (PER) and the payload bit error rate (pBER). The impact of packet preamble lengths of 16, 32, 48, and 64 bits, at 10 Gb/s, on the receiver performance is investigated. We show that there is a trade-off between pBER and PER that is limited by electrical noise and digitizer clipping at low and high received powers, respectively, and that a 16/2-bit preamble at 10/1.25 Gb/s is sufficient to reliably detect packets at both line-rates over a burst-to-burst dynamic range of 14,5dB with a sensitivity of -18.5dBm at 10 Gb/s. (C)2011 Optical Society of Americ