Laboratory Facilities
The UnWiReD
laboratory's focus on experimental wireless communications is supported
by an exceptional collection of facilities that is unique among
university research laboratories. These facilities include a full
complement of the most sophisticated test and measurement
instrumentation available as well as two custom-built wireless
testbeds. The defining characteristic of the lab's facilities is the
ability to exploit the multidimensional characteristics of wireless
channels using software defined radio architecture. The multi-antenna,
wideband, and real-time capabilities of these facilities allow
researchers to evaluate advanced physical layer wireless communications
simultaneously in space, time, and frequency. The following lists
highlight the lab's facilities.
Test &
Measurement Instrumentation
- Agilent 89600 Vector Signal Analyzer
- Agilent 54622D Mixed Signal Scope
- Agilent E4402B Spectrum Analyzer
- Agilent ESG Arbitrary Signal Generator
- Agilent 8648D Signal Generator
- Agilent 33250A Function Generator
Narrowband Wireless
Testbed
The Narrowband
Testbed is a software-defined multi-antenna transceiver capable of
supporting a 4 KHz bandwidth at 220MHz center frequency.
These hardware components can be configured as a cellular network as
well as a peer-to-peer network. The following components comprise the
testbed hardware:
- Digital transmit
processor supporting up to 3 antennas (Fig. 1).
- 220MHz
full-duplex high power radios (Fig. 2).
- Digital down
converter and receiver processor supporting up to 4 antennas (Fig. 3).
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Mobile digital
receivers for multi-user networking studies (Fig. 4).
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Fig.
1. Digital transmitter.
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Fig.
2. High power radio |
Fig.
3. Digital receiver. |
Fig.
4 Mobile receiver. |
Wideband Wireless
Testbed
The Wideband
Testbed is a software-defined multi-antenna transceiver capable of
supporting a 20MHz bandwidth at 2.4 and 5.2 GHz over each of 16
channels. This testbed is can be configured for current wireless LAN
standards such as 802.11g and is supporting research on future
technologies for broadband multi-antenna systems.It includes the
following hardware components:
- Digital transmit
processor supporting up to 4 antennas (Fig. 5).
- Sixteen
2.4/5.2GHz single antenna radios (Fig. 6).
-
Digital down
converter and receiver DSP and FPGA supporting up to 4 antennas (Fig.
7).
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Fig. 5.
Transmit DSP unit.
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Fig. 6.
2.4/5.2GHz radios |
Fig. 7.
Receiver DSP and FPGA unit. |
Fig 8.
PropSim C8 channel simulator. |
Radio Channel
Simulator
The lab's
Elektrobit C8 PropSim Channel Simulator (Fig. 8) is an exceptional
instrument and one of very few in the world. It supports real-time
simulations of user programmable channel models over 8 channels, each
with a 70MHz bandwidth covering a 350MHz to 6GHz range of center
frequencies.
Computing Cluster
A 38-node cluster
of LINUX computers supports the laboratories MATLAB and C/C++
simulation requirements.
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