Leveraging an Agile RF Transceiver for Rapid Prototyping of Small-Cell Systems

This paper describes a new software-defined radio (SDR) platform targeted for rapid prototyping of small-cell systems. The SDR hardware combines the signal processing power of Xilinx ML605 Virtex-6 FPGA board with the Nutaq Radio420X frequency-agile transceiver and reconfigurable antennas to form a highly versatile platform for spectrum sensing, spectrum access, and cooperative communications. We evaluate the platform with two example applications: an offline OFDM physical processing flow based on WARPLab, and a real-time online automatic gain control mechanism. The results show that our SDR platform can reliably handle both offline and online processing demands with the added benefit of frequency agility offered by a state-of-the-art radio transceiver.