Implementation and performance analysis of software defined radio (SDR) based LTE platform for truck connectivity application

Abstract: In today’s modern era of technology mobile communication is evolving with a higher pace than ever before. New features and applications are added in the existing networks each day. The faster development pace requires a faster way to prototype and test the mobile communication standards/ applications to offer faster delivery to the end user. In traditional practices hardware updates and new features growth take long time to market implementations. Technology tends to be obsolete by the time it is to be launched to the market. The reason being long time required for hardware production. However, in the recent days the trend is changing with the emergence of open source cellular stacks to be used with affordable software defined radio (SDR) hardware platforms. Long term evolution (LTE) open source cellular stacks along with the SDR technology are widely used in research these days. However, the performance and limitations of these SDR based open source cellular stacks needs to be explored. In this project a thorough study is performed to access the performance of an open source SDR based LTE user equipment (UE) software stack. A prototype of Category 4 LTE modem is implemented using the srsLTE application suite. Performance analysis is done by looking into the datarate, SNR and radio frequency (RF) characteristics of the implemented solution for multiple system bandwidth settings. A performance comparison is presented between the high performance SDR platform Universal Software Radio Peripheral x310 and the LimeSDR. The results show that the SDR technology is capable of handling wideband signals like LTE. The choice of SDR hardware platform and open source cellular stack depends on the application. The chosen solution for this project i.e. srsLTE performed well for LTE bandwidths 10 MHz and above in terms of downlink data rate. However, the radio frequency characteristics of selected SDR platforms do not comply fully with the 3GPP standard requirements.