Implementation and Performance Analysis of a Low Resolution OFDM System Prototype With Low Cost Hardware

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, low-resolution OFDM system prototype using affordable SDR hardware, demonstrating its feasibility and energy efficiency compared to higher-resolution ADCs.

Contribution

It introduces a low-cost SDR-based OFDM system with simulated low-resolution ADCs, analyzing its performance and energy savings, which is novel in cost-effective wireless communication hardware.

Findings

ADC with at least 5 bits resolution performs reasonably

Reducing ADC resolution from 8 bits saves significant energy

Low-resolution OFDM system is feasible with low-cost hardware

Abstract

The present work focus on the implementation and analyze of performance of a low-resolution OFDM system prototype with low-cost hardware. A software defined radio (SDR) system was chosen in this implementation due to its various advantages over a traditional radio system. Among the options of SDR devices available, the use of universal software radio peripherals (USRP) was avoided due to its high cost, despite its popularity in this field of research. Alternatively, a combination of two low-cost SDRs, "Hackrf One" and "RTL- SDR Blog V3" with the GNU Radio, a popular, free and open source radio software, were used. Thus, it was possible to emulate the behavior of a low resolution ADC in the receiver, characterize its performance and estimate its energy savings. This allowed us to determine the feasibility of building a component with the analog-to-digital conversion function with few bits of resolution. We conclude that the performance of an ADC with at least 5 bits of resolution is pretty reasonable and that this reduction in the number of bits, in comparison to 8-bit ADC, represents a fairly expressive energy saving.