Innovative communication design lab based on PC sound card and Matlab: a software-defined-radio OFDM modem example

An innovative software-defined radio (SDR) approach to advanced communication design lab courseware is proposed and illustrated by an audio-band OFDM transceiver design example. Implementation of this new approach needs only the most common PC sound card and Matlab software, making such a lab course extremely easy to setup at a minimum cost. Moreover, all system parameters and algorithms are embodied in the form of high-level RX and TX programs, which can be modified and tested very flexibly. In this aspect, this approach has all the advantages of simulation-based experiments. However, it further touches real-world implementation issues. A real-world passband signal in the audio band can be physically generated and simultaneously recorded by the full-duplex sound card, and then the received digitized signal can be demodulated by an SDR receiver which implements all the required DSP algorithms in Matlab code.