Designing a hardware in the loop wireless digital channel emulator for software defined radio

The testing, verification and evaluation of wireless systems is an important but challenging endeavor. The most realistic method to test a wireless system is a field deployment. Unfortunately, this is not only expensive but also time consuming. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a digital wireless channel emulator, which connects directly to a number of radios, and mimics the wireless channels between them, across a range of scenarios, in real-time. We use high-level synthesis tools to design the emulator while performing design space exploration. We describe the optimizations and tradeoffs that were necessary to reach the target throughput and area requirements.