Software-Defined Radio-Based Evaluation Platform for Highly Mobile IEEE 802.22 System

Wide-area communication systems using TV white space (TVWS) are promising technologies capable of full-coverage and cost-effective vehicular and transportation communications owing to their excellent propagation characteristics. IEEE 802.22 was developed as a TVWS-based fixed communication standard to support a wide coverage area of 10–30 km. To cope with the various applications in mobile communication, the transmission performance needs to be enhanced and evaluated. Thus, it becomes necessary to develop an experimental platform to enable the flexible implementation of transmitter and receiver algorithms. In this regard, we propose a software-defined radio (SDR)-based evaluation platform enabling the bench testing of physical layer (PHY) performance for highly mobile IEEE 802.22 communication systems. Using this platform, radio frequency signals can be transmitted and received using reconfigurable hardware and software, with the received baseband signals being recorded and stored by the SDR device. The stored data were post-processed using a MATLAB-based program to evaluate the transmission performance. The performance achieved by SDR-based evaluation system is similar to computer simulations, thereby demonstrating the feasibility of highly mobile IEEE 802.22 communication systems. Moreover, the proposed evaluation platform is available for future field experiments to encourage the development and evaluation of novel PHY algorithms.