A Wideband Radio Channel Sounder for Non-Stationary Channels: Design, Implementation and Testing

The increasing bandwidths and frequencies proposed for new mobile communications give rise to new challenges for system designers. Channel sounding and channel characterization are important tasks to provide useful information for the design of systems, protocols, and techniques to fight the propaga...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inElectronics (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 15; p. 1838
Main Authors López-Valcárcel, Luis A., García Sánchez, Manuel
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2021
Subjects
Bandwidths
Channels
Communication
Doppler effect
Field programmable gate arrays
Receivers & amplifiers
Transmitters
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Summary:The increasing bandwidths and frequencies proposed for new mobile communications give rise to new challenges for system designers. Channel sounding and channel characterization are important tasks to provide useful information for the design of systems, protocols, and techniques to fight the propagation impairments. In this paper, we present a novel radio channel sounder capable of dealing with non-stationary channels. It can be operated in real-time and has a compact size to ease transport. For versatility and cost purposes, the core of the system is implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Three measurement campaigns have been conducted to illustrate the performance of the sounder in both static and non-static channels. In its current configuration, the sounder reaches an RF null-to-null bandwidth of 1 GHz, providing a delay resolution of 2 ns, a maximum measurable Doppler shift of 7.63 kHz, and 4.29 s of continuous acquisition time. A comparison with other channel sounders in the literature reveals that our proposal achieves a good combination of performance, cost, and size.
ISSN:2079-9292
2079-9292
DOI:10.3390/electronics10151838