Demonstration of a 1.2 Gbps Always-on Fully-Connected Mesh Network with RFSoC SDRs

TL;DR

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first demonstration of low-latency digitally controlled frequency-division duplex (FDD) RFSoC-based MIMO wireless links capable of simultaneously supporting multiple real-time, uncompressed 4K video streams.

Abstract

We design and implement on Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) software-defined radios (SDRs) a complete-graph network of four unmanned aerial vehicles and demonstrate real-time 4K video streaming over twelve always-on 2x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links. The testbed operates at an aggregate network throughput of approximately 1.2 Gbps (i.e., 12 links of 99.84 Mbps) across a shared bandwidth of 200 MHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of low-latency digitally controlled frequency-division duplex (FDD) RFSoC-based MIMO wireless links capable of simultaneously supporting multiple real-time, uncompressed 4K video streams. The testbed consists of four AMD/Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC ZCU111 evaluation kits configured as a fully-connected mesh network with custom-built physical and medium-access-control layers, adaptive equalization, and adjacent-band filtering implemented entirely in RFSoC's programmable logic. A host-side graphical user interface (GUI) provides real-time visualization of each link's performance including error vector magnitude (EVM), pre-detection signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and bit error rate (BER), and enables dynamic reconfiguration of link parameters during operation.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Complete-graph network of four UAVs.
• Figure 2: Over-the-air (OTA) software-defined radio testbed with 2×2 MIMO RFSoC SDRs.
• Figure 3: High-level hardware architecture of wireless transmitter and receiver.