UWB Real-Time Testbed with Waveform-Based Precoding

This paper reports recent progress in ultra-wideband (UWB) radio testbed design and development. Experimental radio testbeds are ideal means to verify theoretically ideas, test feasibility, and reduce the uncertainty between theoretical expectation and practical implementation. The testbed under development has been designed as a general experimental platform to explore the advanced radio technologies, such as UWB based communications as well as ranging, physical layer security, optimum transmit waveforms, and cognitive radio. Our preliminary testbed includes a transmitter and a receiver, with a single UWB antenna at each side. It can be expanded to include multiple transmitters and receivers, multiple antennas at one or both sides, and a feedback link paired with the forward link. Programmability and flexibility are top concerns in the system design, and these two design goals are reflected throughout the three building blocks, i.e., baseband, mixed-signal and RF front-end. Two major contributions of the paper are: 1) providing the art of design and implementation with theoretical guideline; 2) demonstration of a set of end-to-end radio testbed for a wide range of research exploration-To our best knowledge, it is the first testbed with UWB time reversal function.