A Universal Hardware Platform for an LTE-Advanced Base Station Prototyping

Abstract

This paper presents a universal hardware platform (UHP) based on software defined radio (SDR) technology and developed to accelerate the prototyping and testing new hardware and algorithmic solutions for modern radio systems. There are two integrated transceivers and a baseband processor on the board. Thus, four complete RF transmitting and receiving channels, with observation paths for transmitted signals monitoring could be supported. Our platform can be operated in both time-division (TDD) and frequency-division (FDD) duplex schemes over a 300 MHz to 6 GHz frequency range with simultaneous synthesis and analysis in the bandwidth of up to 100 MHz. The radio system is formed by attaching an appropriate RF front-end to the UHP and uploading standard-specific software. As examples of possible UHP applications, two LTE-Advanced micro base stations for private networks with standard-defined RF front-ends operating in the LTE band B43 (3.6 GHz) with time duplex and the band B31 (450 MHz) in FDD mode are presented.