A MATLAB platform for characterizing MIMO-OFDM communications with software-defined radios

A new MATLAB-based, wireless measurement platform using an existing software-defined radio architecture is presented. It augments IEEE 802.11g MIMO-OFDM physical layer schemes with new designs such as Maximal Ratio Combining, Alamouti coding, and Spatial Multiplexing. The platform provides a series of metrics, including channel capacity, Error Vector Magnitude (EVM), and Post-Processing Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PP-SNR) to characterize link and network performance. The software implementation and test protocol of the platform are presented with a validation study demonstrating its application.