Mixed hardware-software testbed for IEEE-802.11n

In this paper, the design and implementation of a new high performance hardware channel emulator is presented. The purpose of the developed emulator is to efficiently reproduce in a laboratory environment the accurate behaviour of several effects of the radio channel over a multiple antennas wireless communication system, including AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise), multipath, attenuation and Doppler shift. The main application target is the test and the performance evaluation of a new 802.11n transceiver. The resulting hardware platform is very flexible, allowing, for example, the simulation of systems with variable numbers of input/output antennas, and a programmable number of considered paths as well as their relative delays. The prototype has been implemented on a board including both an ARM processor and a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and it supports the simulation of a 40 MHz radio frequency bandwidth. This paper describes the main issues related with the design of this emulator and reports the laboratory measurements on the first implemented prototype