Georgia Tech Software Radio Laboratory

The Georgia Tech Broadband Institute of the Georgia Institute of Technology is establishing a Software Radio Laboratory in the Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology (GCATT). The laboratory, which is planned to be operational in early 2000, has been designed as a testbed for research, development, test, and evaluation of software radio concepts. The laboratory consists of waveform generators and communications signal sources, local area networking transceivers, radio frequency (RF) channel emulators with branch diversity and smart antenna emulation capabilities, and a multichannel programmable VME-based software radio platform. The software radio platform incorporates a programmable RF front-end, digital down-converters, and multiple Quad TI-C6x DSP boards to facilitate algorithm development for intermediate frequency (IF), baseband, and bitstream processing. The laboratory promises to have capability for addressing a broad spectrum of problems including the development and test of communications modulation techniques, access methods, traffic types, channel distortion effects, transmitter diversity, receiver signal processing algorithms, coding, power control, and many other diverse topics of research.