The wireless communications test-bed will provide key lab facility for testing, verifying and optimizing much of the faculty research in DSP, smart antennas, MIMO systems, and iterative decoding techniques. It will be a central lab facility that will integrate and facilitate multidisciplinary research among faculty. The requested signal generator (Agilent E4438C), and the vector signal analyzer receiver (Agilent 89600S) will provide ample opportunity for experimenting with different wireless communications standards, variety of modulation schemes, and even with the ability to program (using MATLAB) and down load new standards that are being developed by our researchers. Similarly, much of the testing and verification in the coding and decoding area will be done based on data collected from the testbed and no longer will be based on theoretical channel models. To preserve speeds of simulated data, it may be necessary to collect the experimental data and perform the processing offline. The selected 89600 model is particularly attractive because of its ability to link to Agilent‘s EESof Advanced Design software. This is of significant value to designers of RF wireless components as they can actually conduct measurements on simulated hardware. This allows designers to test entire systems, evaluate its behavior with only partial hardware available.

It should be emphasized that in addition to the signal generator and vector analyzer, we included RF channel emulator (Spirent FLEX5/Q1) and universal interference emulator (Spirent TAS5600W) as part of this testbed. These two pieces of equipment will us with a universal wireless communications test facility that will be used for channel modeling, testing of coding procedures under variety of channel interference and signal to noise levels, and also for testing DSP algorithms for smart antenna, multiuser detection, and for the estimation of MIMO capacity, limitations, and optimization procedures.