Design of a Measurement Platform for Communications Systems

This paper presents a programmable measuring platform that integrates a powerful processing unit combining software and hardware modules with a set of powerful signal generation and analysis instruments for realizing realistic evaluations and measurements on receiver subunits and receiver prototypes. The test-bed exploits the telecommunication instruments in order to provide fully controlled channel emulation while it can manipulate real signals from various antennas through respective processing implemented inside its software and hardware circuits. All the units of the test-bed are interconnected through the Gigabit Ethernet interface which gives the necessary means for systematic and efficient multi-level measurements of various receiver processing circuits. The key feature of the presented platform is that it can be easily adapted to any standard and specification due to its programmable nature. For better realization of the platform capabilities and potential, the newest European standard for broadband satellite communications DVB-S2 is used for evaluation purposes.