Radio-in-the-Loop: Design Tools for Software Radios Tutorial

Presented by John Irza, The Mathworks, USA

The design of next generation communications systems such as cognitive radios will be challenged by real world signals and environments that will be difficult to exhaustively simulate. As a result there is a need to enable engineers to include radio hardware in the design and verification process, allowing them to use actual over-the-air signals as part of their design process.

To enable the integrated approach of using radio hardware in concert with design tools and simulation environments, it is also necessary to support streaming signal processing. This is in contrast to the traditional “batch” processing of offline data.

In this tutorial we will highlight the advantages for designing wireless systems using radio hardware in the loop in a computational environment that supports streaming data processing. Examples of integrating MATLAB algorithms and Simulink communications system models with the USRP2 and other SDR hardware will be shown.