Design of Software-Defined Radio Channel Simulator for Wireless Communications: Case Study With DSRC and UWB Channels

The software-defined radio (SDR) channel simulator is designed for testing the baseband transceiver of various wireless communication systems. The SDR architecture and the reconfiguration scheme used for changing the channel conditions and reconfiguring the hardware of the processing modules in the SDR channel simulator are presented. The simulator is capable of simulating four multipath fading channels and dedicated fading channels operating in various air interface specifications of wireless communication systems according to the demands of users. An example of the SDR channel simulator implemented with the air interface standards of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) and ultrawideband (UWB) systems is carried out to observe the characteristics of two multipath fading channels and the hardware reconfiguration capability of processing modules and validate its correctness. The functions of the proposed SDR channel simulator can be extended to other new or modified air interface specifications of wireless communication systems without any hardware modification.