This paper presents Virginia Tech’s wireless testbed supporting research on long-term evolution (LTE) signaling and radio frequency (RF) spectrum coexistence. LTE is continuously refined and new features released. As the communications contexts for LTE expand, new research problems arise and include operation in harsh RF signaling environments and coexistence with other radios. Our testbed provides an integrated research tool for investigating these and other research problems; it allows analyzing the severity of the problem, designing and rapidly prototyping solutions, and assessing them with standard-compliant equipment and test procedures. The modular testbed integrates general-purpose software-defined radio hardware, LTE-specific test equipment, RF components, free open-source and commercial LTE software, a configurable RF network and recorded radar waveform samples. It supports RF channel emulated and over-the-air radiated modes. The testbed can be remotely accessed and configured. An RF switching network allows for designing many different experiments that can involve a variety of real and virtual radios with support for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna operation. We present the testbed, the research it has enabled and some valuable lessons that we learned and that may help designing, developing, and operating future wireless testbeds.
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Creating RF Scenarios for Large-scale, Real-time Wireless Channel Emulators
Recent years have seen the introduction of large- scale platforms for experimental wireless research. These platforms, which include testbeds like those of the PAWR program and emulators like Colosseum, allow researchers to prototype and test their solutions in a sound yet realistic wireless environment before actual deployment. Emulators, in particular, enable wire- less experiments that are not site-specific as those on real testbeds. Researchers can choose among different radio frequency (RF) scenarios for real-time emulation of a vast variety of different situations, with different numbers of users, RF bandwidth, antenna counts, hardware requirements, etc. Although very powerful, in that they can emulate virtually any real-world deployment, emulated scenarios are only as useful as how accurately they can capture the targeted wireless channel and environment. Achieving emulation accuracy is particularly challenging, especially for experiments at scale for which emulators require considerable amounts of computational resources. In this paper we propose a framework to create RF scenarios for emulators like Colosseum from rich forms of inputs, like those obtained by measurements through radio equipment or via software (e.g., ray-tracers and electromagnetic field solvers). Our framework optimally scales down the large set of RF data in input to the fewer parameters allowed by the emulator by using efficient clustering techniques and channel impulse response re-sampling. We showcase our method by generating wireless scenarios for Colosseum by using Remcom’s Wireless InSite, a commercial-grade ray-tracer that produces key characteristics of the wireless channel. Examples are provided for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight scenarios on portions of the Northeastern University main campus.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1925601
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10298726
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE MedComNet 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
