A Millimeter-Wave Software-Defined Radio for Wireless Experimentation

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, portable millimeter-wave SDR for 60 GHz wireless experimentation, featuring a novel waveform-triggered reception method to enable rapid beam sweeping and data collection.

Contribution

It introduces a waveform-triggered reception technique and buffer mechanism to facilitate fast beam sweeping in a low-cost SDR platform for 60 GHz wireless research.

Findings

Successfully conducted rapid beam sweeping with 4096 beam pairs.

Generated a dataset for physical layer parameter analysis.

Demonstrated flexible and efficient wireless experimentation setup.

Abstract

In this study, we propose a low-cost and portable millimeter-wave software-defined radio (SDR) for wireless experimentation in the 60 GHz band. The proposed SDR uses Xilinx RFSoC2x2 and Sivers EVK06002 homodyne transceiver and provides a TCP/IP-based interface for companion computer (CC)-based baseband signal processing. To address the large difference between the processing speed of the CC and the sample rate of analog-to-digital converters, we propose a method, called waveform-triggered reception (WTR), where a hard-coded block detects a special trigger waveform to acquire a pre-determined number of IQ samples upon the detection. We also introduce a buffer mechanism to support discontinuous transmissions. By utilizing the WTR along with discontinuous transmissions, we conduct a beam sweeping experiment, where we evaluate 4096 beam pairs rapidly without compromising the flexibility of the CC-based processing. We also generate a dataset that allows one to calculate physical layer parameters such as signal-to-noise ratio and channel frequency response for a given pair of transmit and receive beam indices.