Real-Time Hardware Emulation of Frequency Non-stationary UWB Channels with Continuous Frequency Response

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication technology has been widely used for indoor localization and is promising to provide high transmission rate in the future communication networks. Considering the frequency non-stationarity of channel parameters, an UWB channel model with continuous frequency response is proposed. To improve the real-time performance and reduce the complexity of hardware implementation, a discrete channel model for hardware implementation is obtained, and then the closed-form of this discrete UWB channel model is derived. Based on which, a real-time channel emulator is developed on a software-defined radio hardware platform, where a parallel multi-channel data processing architecture is adopted to realize the real-time processing of high-speed data. The results show that the output results of developed channel emulator are well consistent with the measured results of Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) in an indoor scenario and have better performance of delay resolution than that of traditional channel emulator. The channel emulator can be used for optimization, verification, and evaluation of UWB communication systems.