Designing a hardware in the loop wireless digital channel emulator for software defined radio
Janarbek Matai, Pingfan Meng, Lingjuan Wu, Brad T. Weals, Ryan Kastner · 2012
The testing, verification and evaluation of wireless systems is an important but challenging endeavor. The most realistic method to test a wireless system is a field deployment. Unfortunately, this is not only expensive but also time consuming. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a digital wireless channel emulator, which connects directly to a number of radios, and mimics the wireless channels between them, across a range of scenarios, in real-time. We use high-level synthesis tools to design the emulator while performing design space exploration. We describe the optimizations and tradeoffs that were necessary to reach the target throughput and area requirements.