whiteLAN
Arun Ashok, Iyappan Subbiah, Gábor Varga, Moritz Schrey, Andreas Achtzehn, Marina Petrova, Stefan J. Heinen · 2014
To build large and scalable setups, researchers usually employ mixed testbeds of regular SDR devices and cheaper, generally less flexible COTS devices. Such hybrid setups often face uncontrollable interference from other users in the ISM bands, which leads to incomparable results and requires frequent repetitions of experiments. Maintaining the ability to use COTS devices and ISM band-only SDR devices while moving experiments to less crowded frequency bands is thus of high interest to practical wireless communications research. In this paper we present whiteLAN, a frequency converter that enables IEEE 802.11b/g devices to operate over UHF frequencies. We discuss the advantages of a ISM-UHF converter setup, present the hardware architecture of our solution, and provide key performance metrics of the physical implementation. Through a comparative study of ISM vs. UHF operations we show that whiteLAN is viable for use as a plug-and-play extension for wireless research deployments.