Demo: An RFSoC-Based Testbed for Over-the-Air Wireless Transceiver at Millimeter Wave Frequency

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel RFSoC-based hardware testbed for over-the-air wireless communication at 29.8 GHz, demonstrating end-to-end mmWave communication with BER analysis under real channel conditions.

Contribution

It presents a new RFSoC and analog front-end hardware platform enabling over-the-air mmWave communication with beamforming capabilities.

Findings

Successful demonstration of over-the-air communication at 29.8 GHz

Bit error rate analysis under RF impairments and beam misalignments

Integration of RFSoC with multi-antenna analog front-end

Abstract

The millimeter wave (mmW) frequency spectrum has been explored recently for large bandwidth communication. At these frequencies, narrow directional beams are required for communication since the signal attenuation is high due to atmospheric absorption. This work presents an AMD RFSoC and Sivers Semiconductors analog front-end based hardware testbed capable of directional communication via analog beamforming at mmW. The proposed testbed comprises orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based baseband physical layer and digital front-end on an ARM processor and field programmable gate array (FPGA), respectively, integrated with high-speed data converters of the RFSoC. The RFSoC output at sub-6GHz is integrated with a mmW multi-antenna analog-front end for over- the-air communication at 29.8 GHz. We demonstrate end-to-end communication over the air and present bit error rate (BER) analysis in the presence of radio frequency impairments and beam misalignments in real radio channels.