Demonstration of a 1.2 Gbps Always-on Fully-Connected Mesh Network with RFSoC SDRs

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a 1.2 Gbps fully-connected mesh network using RFSoC SDRs, supporting real-time 4K video streaming over multiple MIMO links with low latency and adaptive control.

Contribution

It presents the first low-latency RFSoC-based MIMO wireless links capable of supporting multiple uncompressed 4K streams in a fully-connected mesh network.

Findings

Achieved 1.2 Gbps aggregate throughput across 12 links.

Supported simultaneous real-time 4K video streams.

Enabled dynamic reconfiguration of network parameters.

Abstract

We design and implement on Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) software-defined radios (SDRs) a complete-graph network of four unmanned aerial vehicles and demonstrate real-time 4K video streaming over twelve always-on 2x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links. The testbed operates at an aggregate network throughput of approximately 1.2 Gbps (i.e., 12 links of 99.84 Mbps) across a shared bandwidth of 200 MHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of low-latency digitally controlled frequency-division duplex (FDD) RFSoC-based MIMO wireless links capable of simultaneously supporting multiple real-time, uncompressed 4K video streams. The testbed consists of four AMD/Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC ZCU111 evaluation kits configured as a fully-connected mesh network with custom-built physical and medium-access-control layers, adaptive equalization, and adjacent-band filtering implemented entirely in RFSoC's programmable logic. A host-side graphical user interface (GUI) provides real-time visualization of each link's performance including error vector magnitude (EVM), pre-detection signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and bit error rate (BER), and enables dynamic reconfiguration of link parameters during operation.