AirFPGA: A Software Defined Radio platform based on NetFPGA

This paper introduces AirFPGA, a scalable, high-speed, remote controlled software defined radio (SDR) platform implemented using a NetFPGA board, a digitizer and a Radio Frequency (RF) receiver. The AirFPGA is a system built on the NetFPGA that allows baseband recording and playback of wireless signals, as well as distributed processing. It captures radio signals, processes them in reconfigurable hardware, and sends the data via high speed Gigabit Ethernet to PCs or other NetFPGAs for additional computations. This paper describes the system architecture, data path, testbed implementation and test results. The paper demonstrates the system’s verification using a signal generator. It also describes an application consisting of monitoring a commercial AM station.