The CMU Wireless Network Emulator

 

Version 3 of the wireless network emulator became operational in Summer 2006 and had 8 nodes, as of August.  It supported the full 2.4 GHz ISM band and had 4 nodes.  This web page has some pictures of the various components.

 


The core of the emulator is the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Card, shown above. It includes a large FPGA that executes the channel models.  It has 16 connections, one of which is used to connect to the Emulator Controller while the other 15 can be used to connect wireless devices using Digital Signal Conversion (DSC) modules.

 

The DSC module for version 3 of the emulator has only two cards: a DSC card and a frontend.  They are packaged as shown below.  An earlier version of the emulator used a 5-card DSC module (see here), which was much more cumbersome to work with.

 

 

The DSC module, together with the wireless devices, is packaged in an RF shielded box, which is then rack mounted.  The picture below shows a 7 node emulator.  The DSP card is in the middle of the rack – 4 of the nodes are above it while 3 nodes sit below it. The node at the bottom is an “observer” node that can be used for signal analysis and injection.

 

 

Last updated August 2006.