Conclusion¶

In this project, a satellite channel emulator has been designed integrating radiofrequency devices in a LabView programming environment. The proposed implementation is able to reproduce the noise and time delay effects that affect a satellite link.

Thanks to the hardware and software combined architecture, a rapid emulator development is achieved providing a suitable trade-off between the cost, the complexity and the performance. In addition, one advantage of this designing approach is that the available features can be extended in order to emulate more complicated and realistic satellite scenarios, for instance, including phase noise, multipath fading, etc.

On the other hand, since the signal processing is highly power consuming while computing, the next step is to exploit the integrated FPGA capabilities to perform the satellite channel processing, which is currently executed in the NI PXIe-8135.