Development of a real-time testbed for studying demodulation techniques in a jamming environment

A testbed that allows a variety of modulation and demodulation techniques to be implemented in programmable hardware and performance in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and jamming conditions to be measured is described. Field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology is used in the majority of the modulators and demodulators to allow the design to be easily modified to investigate new modulation/demodulation approaches. AWGN hardware performance is compared with theoretical simulations as a check on both implementation loss and simulation validity. A jammer simulator that interfaces with the testbed has also been constructed. Various jammer threats can be introduced on the communications link, and resultant performance can be measured, displayed, and recorded