Design and validation of a scalable digital wireless channel emulator using an FPGA computing cluster

1 online resource (169 pages) : PDF

2013

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

A Digital Wireless Channel Emulator (DWCE) is a system that is capable of emulating the RF environment for a group of wireless devices. The use of digital wireless channel emulators with networking radios is hampered by the inability to efficiently scale a DWCE to a large number of nodes. If such a large scale digital wireless channel emulator were to exist, a significant amount of time and money could be saved by testing networking radios in a laboratory before running lengthy and costly field tests. By utilizing the repeatability of a laboratory environment it will be possible to investigate and solve issues more quickly and efficiently. This will enable the performance of the radios to be known with a high degree of certainty before they are brought to the field. This dissertation investigates the use of an FPGA cluster configured as a distributed system to provide the computational and network structure to scale a DWCE to support 1250 or more wireless devices. This number of wireless devices is approximately two orders of magnitude larger than any other documented system. In this dissertation, the term "scale" used for a DWCE is defined as an increase of three key factors: number of wireless devices, signal bandwidth emulated, and the fidelity of the emulation. It is possible to make tradeoffs and reduce any one of these to increase the other two. This dissertation shows a DWCE that can increase all of these factors in an efficient manner and thoroughly investigates the fidelity of the emulation it produces.

doctoral dissertations

Electrical engineering
Computer engineering

Ph.D.

FPGA Cluster
High Performance Computing
RF Channel Emulation

Electrical Engineering

Sass, Ronald

Conrad, James
Noneaker, Daniel
Xie, Jiang
Lu, Aidong

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2013.

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Buscemi_uncc_0694D_10547

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:326