A rapid prototyping framework for practical OFDMA systems using Software Defined Radios

State-of-the-art wireless technologies such as LTE employ OFDMA to enable robust and efficient frequency-division multiple access, which is also promising for other scenarios, such as Wireless Mesh Networks. OFDMA can improve throughput by allocating subchannels to the users which experience the best performance on the corresponding frequencies. This has lead to a large body of work on subchannel allocation schemes which optimize throughput while guaranteeing fairness. However, most solutions are discussed at a purely theoretical and/or simulative level. In this paper, we provide a framework for prototyping such schemes on the WARP Software Defined Radio to obtain practical results with small implementation overhead. We design a mechanism which allows to analyze offline how a certain allocation technique would have performed in a previously measured scenario. Moreover, we show that our approach is stable and robust regarding practical issues. While we focus on Wireless Mesh Networks, our system can easily be adapted to infrastructure-based systems.