A Software Simulation Testbed for CDMA Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

This thesis develops a software wireless communication testbed which simulates a Code Division Multiple Access(CDMA) link. CDMA is a popular technology in cellular systems due to its superior capacity and performance. The designer of CDMA systems has a wide array of signal processing algorithms to choose from and a variety of operating environments to deal with. The testbed is a tool to evaluate these design options and trade-offs in different scenarios. The backbone of this system is a wireless CDMA multiuser link built using Simulink and Matlab. An efficient method of system modeling is used to speed up the simulations. This testbed can be used to study the performance of a CDMA wireless link with variation in system parameters and channel conditions. The use of Real-Time Workshop for DSP code generation is studied. This method is useful for rapid prototyping of algorithms and in DSP-based simulation acceleration of the testbed.