Implementation and evaluation of a Quadrature Phase Shift Keying model on a Software Defined Radio platform

Abstract

With the rapidly growing consumer needs and varying applications in the field of radio communication, the modification of radio devices to suit the multitude of requirements is becoming a costly affair. Software defined radios are potential solutions by offering features like reprogrammability and flexibility. This work aims to implement and evaluate an integrated workflow of transmitter and receiver using the Quadrature Shift Keying modulation scheme, while characterizing the transmitter performance focusing on parameters like Bit Error Rate, Error Vector Magnitude, Occupied Bandwidth, Modulation Error Ratio and effects of noise through use of constellation and vector diagrams. The implementation is conducted through the use of a toolchain containing tools from Mathworks, Simulink, Vivado and the tests are conducted through use of signal analyzing equipment and Python test scripts. The scope of the documentation includes the introduction to algorithm partitioning, some prognosis on the quality of the communication link subject to noise and impairments and its subsequent verification. The measured results were in agreement with the expected behavioral trends predicted by Python and Simulink simulations and the transmitter characterization was also successful in providing some system level metric for its performance evaluation. Lastly, the results are summarized along with some insights on the challenges faced by the chosen methodology and an outlook is presented on improvement and further development for future work.