Architectures for Cognitive Radio Testbeds and Demonstrators – An Overview

Wireless communication standards are developed at an ever-increasing rate of pace, and significant amounts of effort is put into research for new communication methods and concepts. On the physical layer, such topics include MIMO, cooperative communication, and error control coding, whereas research on the medium access layer includes link control, network topology, and cognitive radio. At the same time, implementations are moving from traditional fixed hardware architectures towards software, allowing more efficient development. Today, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and regular desktop computers are fast enough to handle complete baseband processing chains, and there are several platforms, both open-source and commercial, providing such solutions. The aims of this paper is to give an overview of five of the available platforms and their characteristics, and compare the features and performance measures of the different systems

FPGA based multi signal generation with adaptive Crest factor

Detta examensarbetet undersöker möjligheten att eliminera de amplitudtoppar som uppstår då flera sinussignaler av slumpmässiga frekvenser adderas. Det som eftersträvas är en signal innehållande flera godtyckliga frekvenser samtidigt som den bibehåller en låg Crestfaktor (eller PAPR). De metoder som tas fram implementeras sedan i en FPGA. Rapporten behandlar de metoder som undersökts både i teoretiska utvärderingar samt i en hårdvaruimplementation. Resultaten visar på att det inte finns någon enkel lösning på problemet, men att en kombination av metoder kan användas för att få en förbättring av signalens Crestfaktor. Metoderna bör balanseras utefter hur mycket av de icke önskvärda amplitudtopparna som ska elimineras, hur snabbt systemet måste vara, hur mycket resurser och hårdvara som finns tillgänglig, samt hur mycket brus som tolereras. De metoder som undersökts grundligast och även implementerats i hårdvara är initial fasfördelning, tid- och frekvensdomänbytesmetod och klippning, vilka tillsammans bildar ett system som genererar en önskvärd signal med låg Crestfaktor.  This thesis investigates the possibility of eliminating the amplitude peaks that arise when several sinusoidal signals of random frequencies are added. The aim is a signal containing several arbitrary frequencies while retaining a low Crest factor (or PAPR). The methods to be developed are then implemented in an FPGA. The report deals with the methods which were examined, both in theoretical evaluations and in a hardware implementation. The results show that there is no easy solution, but that a combination of methods can be used to obtain an improvement of the signal’s Crest factor. These methods should be balanced with respect to how much of the undesirable amplitude is to be eliminated, how fast the system must be, what kind of resources and hardware that is available, and how much noise that can be tolerated. The methods investigated and implemented in hardware are initial phase distribution, time-frequency domain swapping algorithm and clipping, which together form a system that generates a desirable signal with low Crest factor