Developing A Channel Emulation System for Networked Autonomous Vehicles

Software-defined radio (SDR) allows the generation of real communication signals for diverse applications. SDRs can be coupled with channel emulators to provide performance analysis of real communication signals and protocols in diverse mobile communication scenarios with much less time and expense than full experiments. In this paper, we present our work on developing a system to control a channel matrix to emulate large-scale path loss between a system of autonomous vehicles communicating over wireless channels. A web-based graphical interface was developed to facilitate control of the system and provide real-time visual feedback on the positions of the vehicles and the communication signal levels. The user interface utilizes a PythonIFlask server backend, an HTML/JS/CSS front-end, and HTTP server-client communication with the radios and channel matrix. To reduce the complexity of comparing measured signal levels with the target levels generated from the mobile communication scenario, channel attenuations were measured for a single transmitter and multiple receivers. Further research and development continues to optimize the GUI and scale the number of transceivers.