A software definable MIMO testbed: architecture and functionality

Following the intensive theoretical studies of recently emerged MIMO technology, a variety of performance measures become important to investigate the challenges and trade-offs at various levels throughout MIMO system design process. This paper presents a review of the MIMO testbed recently set up at King’s College London. The architecture that distinguishes the testbed as a flexible and reconfigurable system is first preseneted. This includes both the hardware and software aspects, and is followed by a discussion of implementation methods and evaluation of system research capabilities

LTE Spectrum Sharing Research Testbed: Integrated Hardware, Software, Network and Data

This paper presents Virginia Tech's wireless testbed supporting research on long-term evolution (LTE) signaling and radio frequency (RF) spectrum coexistence. LTE is continuously refined and new features released. As the communications contexts for LTE expand, new research problems arise and include operation in harsh RF signaling environments and coexistence with other radios. Our testbed provides an integrated research tool for investigating these and other research problems; it allows analyzing the severity of the problem, designing and rapidly prototyping solutions, and assessing them with standard-compliant equipment and test procedures. The modular testbed integrates general-purpose software-defined radio hardware, LTE-specific test equipment, RF components, free open-source and commercial LTE software, a configurable RF network and recorded radar waveform samples. It supports RF channel emulated and over-the-air radiated modes. The testbed can be remotely accessed and configured. An RF switching network allows for designing many different experiments that can involve a variety of real and virtual radios with support for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna operation. We present the testbed, the research it has enabled and some valuable lessons that we learned and that may help designing, developing, and operating future wireless testbeds.Comment: In Proceeding of the 10th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization (WiNTECH), Snowbird, Utah, October 201

Testbed-Assisted Learning for Digital Communications Courses

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Computer Applications in Engineering Education, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 539–549, September 2013, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cae.20499. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.[Abstract] We introduce testbed-assisted learning as an effective means for teaching digital communications. Laboratory teaching activities of digital communications courses benefit very much from utilizing a hardware testbed, since it greatly facilitates the understanding of very important effects introduced by real-world transceivers. We overcome the main drawback of communications hardware, that is, the cumbersome low-level programming interfaces provided by hardware manufacturers, by introducing a distributed multilayer software architecture. This architecture provides different abstraction levels to access hardware testbeds, releasing students from the low-level interaction with the hardware. Also, the distributed nature of this architecture results in a high flexibility of operation. This way, students can focus on learning communications topics without devoting any time to low-level programming, that is usually out of the scope of digital communications courses. Thanks to testbed-assisted learning, they are able to perform illustrative experiments to understand digital communications concepts (e.g., source coding, modulation, space-time coding, etc.) and to test algorithms without developing a new program from scratch, speeding up both the implementation and the debugging tasks. However, those students interested in hardware implementations can use the software architecture to access and interact with lower programming levels until they are as close as possible to the hardware.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; CSD2008-00010.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; PGIDIT06TIC10501PRMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación; TEC2007-68020-C04-0

A taxonomy and evaluation for developing 802.11‐based wireless mesh network testbeds

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/92433/1/dac1299.pd

VLSI Architectures and Rapid Prototyping Testbeds for Wireless Systems

The rapid evolution of wireless access is creating an ever changing variety of standards for indoor and outdoor environments. The real-time processing demands of wireless data rates in excess of 100 Mbps is a challenging problem for architecture design and verification. In this paper, we consider current trends in VLSI architecture and in rapid prototyping testbeds to evaluate these systems. The key phases in multi-standard system design and prototyping include: Algorithm Mapping to Parallel Architectures – based on the real-time data and sampling rate and the resulting area, time and power complexity; Configurable Mappings and Design Exploration – based on heterogeneous architectures consisting of DSP, programmable application-specific instruction (ASIP) processors, and co-processors; and Verification and Testbed Integration – based on prototype implementation on programmable devices and integration with RF units.Nokia Foundation FellowshipNokia CorporationNational InstrumentsNational Science Foundatio