The Radio Nodes deployed in FIT/CorteXlab

The National Instruments USRP N2932

The FIT/CorteXlab experimentation room hosts 22 USRP N2932 nodes. The USRP N2932 counts with a wideband RF front-end with the following characteristics:

  • Tranceiver frequency can be set from 400 MHz to 4.4 GHz
  • A GPS disciplined clock based on the OCXO technology, guarantees a precision of up to 0,01 ppb
  • A total of 20 MHz of bandwidth for wideband operation
  • Noise figure of 5 dB
  • Output power of up to 100 mW, more than enough for the environment of the experimentation room

USRP-2932

Resources

FPGA Xilinx® Spartan® 3A-DSP 3400 FPGA
ADC 100 MS/s
DAC 400 MS/s
Conectivity Gigabit Ethernet (with jumboframes)

These USRPs are configured with the UHD firmware, and will operate only with GNU Radio for the moment. The FPGA won’t be accessible to the end users for the moment.

Source: National Instruments and Ettus Research

The Nutaq PicoSDR

The FIT/CorteXlab experimentation room hosts 16 Nutaq PicoSDR nodes. Two models are deployed:

  • The PicoSDR 2×2 (12 nodes total) is composed of a Perseus 6011 carrier board equipped with a Virtex-6 FPGA, a Radio420M FMC stack and a µTCA backplane board for the Perseus and Radio420M operation.
  • The PicoSDR 4×4 (4 nodes total) is composed of two Perseus 6011 carrier boards equipped with a Virtex-6 FPGA, two Radio420M FMC stacks and a µTCA backplane board for the Perseus and Radio420M operation.
nutaq picosdr 4x4

A Nutaq PicoSDR 4×4

Perseus 6011

The Perseus 6011 advanced mezzanine card (AMC or AdvancedMC) is designed around the powerful Virtex-6 FPGA, combining unsurpassed fabric flexibility and a colossal external memory, as well as benefiting from multiple high-pin-count, modular, add-on FMC-based I/O cards.

The Perseus is intended for high-performance, high-bandwidth, low-latency processing applications. The card also takes full advantage of the Virtex-6 FPGA power, which, when combined with Nutaq’s advanced software development tools, makes the Perseus perfect for reducing size, complexity, risks and costs associated to leading-edge telecommunications, networking, industrial, defense and medical applications. On top this, the Perseus’ FMC expansion site offers almost endless I/O possibilities.

Features:

  • Mid-size AMC for μTCA and AdvancedTCA platforms
  • XC6VSX315T Virtex-6 FPGA
  • High-pin-count VITA 57.1 FMC expansion site for I/Os
  • DDR3 SODIMM interface to upgrade system memory
  • Support for AMC R2.0 and R1.0 through onboard clock switch
  • Available GTX base clocks — 100 MHz, 125 MHz, 156.25 MHz (PCIe/GigE/XAUI/SRIO)
  • Fabric clock — RX or TX (100 MHz PCIe, default)
  • IPMI controller (based on the AVR version of the Pigeon Point AdvancedMC MMC)
  • FPGA and IPMI JTAGs on the Mestor interface

Radio 420M

Radio420M

The Radio420M FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) is a powerful multimode SDR RF transceiver module designed around the state-of-the-art, multi-standard, multiband Lime Microsystems LMS6002D RF transceiver IC, which supports broadband coverage, as well as TDD (Time Division Duplex) and FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) full duplex modes of operation. The LMS6002D RF transceiver IC bandwidth (1.5–28 MHz), selectable at will, makes it suitable for a large number of narrowband and broadband applications with excellent channel selectivity. Combined with multiple references and synchronization modes, the Radio420M is suited for such applications as multimode software-defined radio (SDR), advanced telecommunications (MIMO systems, cognitive radios, LTE, WiMAX, white space, Wi-Fi, GSM, WCDMA), and signal intelligence (SIGINT).

Features

  • SISO, dual-band and 2×2 MIMO RF transceivers
  • Wide frequency range — 300 MHz–3.8 GHz
  • Selectable bandwidth — 1.5–28 MHz
  • Multiple reference configurations and expansion modes
  • Individually shielded RX and TX analog paths

FPGA : XC6VSX315T

Resources

Logic Resources (Slices) 49200
Logic Resources (Logic Cells) 314880
Memory Resources (Block RAM (kb)) 25344
Clock Resources (MMCM) 12
Embedded Hard IP Resources : PCIe 2
Embedded Hard IP Resources : GigE 4
Embedded Hard IP Resources : GTX Transceivers (Low Power) 24
Configuration Memory (Mb) 104.5

Source: Nutaq

The Hikob Wireless Sensor Node

The FIT/CorteXlab experimentation room hosts 42 Wireless Sensor Nodes. Those nodes are the same as those deployed in our sister testbed project: FIT/IoT-lab.
The WSN deployed in FIT/CorteXlab are:

  • 21x M3 nodes (ARM Cortex M3 based nodes);
  • 21x A8 nodes (ARM Cortex A8 based nodes).

These nodes are specifically developed by Hikob, a french R&D startup, for the FIT testbeds.

 

The Neousys Nuvo 3000 node control PC

In order to control and operate the SDR radio nodes, Neousys Nuvo 3000 industrial grade PCs are deployed alongside each one of them.
The model deployed is the Nuvo-3003E-I7QC.