Hierarchical Full Mesh RF Fading Channel Emulator

The Navy is looking to research and develop a multi-channel, programmable, scalable, and extensible Radio Frequency (RF) channel emulator that enables laboratory verification of next-generation radio and waveform capabilities. The emulator must provide a high fidelity operationally representative RF environment consisting of delay, attenuation, Doppler shift, and fading over 2 MHz to 2 GHz for networks of 8 to 100 nodes with high isolation between the nodes. The system should support several hundred MHz bandwidth, delays up to one second, and satellite uplink/downlink frequency conversions. Bedford Signals proposes to solve this problem by combining our custom DSP hardware and algorithms with an efficient, scalable, and extensible hierarchical structure to emulate a full mesh RF network. Our existing technology for implementing the delay, Doppler shift, and fading models includes a patented high precision dynamic delay implementation that models the carrier and modulation, delay and Doppler between a transmit antenna and multiple receive antennas, and efficient decimating and interpolating filter implementations to model fading.