Frequency Domain Zadoff-Chu Sounding Technique for USRPs

This paper proposes a technique for a wireless channel sounding and shows its real-world measurement results. The proposed technique is exploited to characterize different indoor channels for a 800-900 MHz band. We utilize an Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and GNU Radio software. At the transmitter side, Zadoff-Chu sequence is generated and sent across the channel, while the carrier frequency of the transmitted sequence is swept across the measured bandwidth. The achieved response is also compared with the frequency domain technique, where continuous wave is used as a sounding signal. Using the proposed method, the basic channel characteristics like RMS delay spread, mean excess delay, path-loss and coherence bandwidth are extracted in shorter time period compared to the continuous wave method.