A Software Defined Ultra Wideband Communication System Testbed

Software Defined Radios (SDR) have the potential of changing the fundamental usage model of wireless communications devices, but the capabilities of these transceivers are often limited by the speed of the underlying ADCs, DSPs, and FPGAs. A SDR receiver provides tremendous flexibility and rapid prototyping capabilities over a fixed hardware implementation. Such a receiver has the capability of supporting multiple data rates, modulation or multiple access schemes, can adapt to the propagation environment, and is capable of operating with a variety of waveforms and communication standards. Currently, state-of-the-art Impulse Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication systems are composed of custom-developed hardware, and do not use SDR architectures. Several major challenges are involved in developing such a communication system— such systems require extremely high sampling rates, generate huge amounts of sample data, and require a tremendous amount of digital processing power. These challenges are particularly daunting when Commercially available Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components are used in the development of such a system. In this paper, we investigate the development of a UWB SDR Transceiver Testbed based around an 8 GHz-8 ADC Time Interleaved Sampling array. The overall objective is to develop a testbed that will allow researchers to evaluate different UWB modulation, multiple access, and coding schemes, and will support raw data rates of up to 100 MB/s.