5G Millimeter Wave Leakage

About This Project

The goal of this Project is to determine how well a given millimeter wave frequency (ie waveforms sent at frequencies above 20 MGhz, as 5G will need to be) can stay within its allotted bandwidth. This will be accomplished by measuring the amount of "leakage" - the amount of extra energy that is present due to the transmission of a wave - at various frequencies between about 25-28GHz.

Week 1

*Learned how to use some initial Linux commands and access nodes (ie remote computers) in Orbit Lab
*Discovered how to image nodes to load a previous software setup
*Began first tutorial on sending and viewing analog waveforms with Software Defined Radios ^{(Image 1)}

Week 2

*Sent analog waves of various shapes (Square, Sinusoidal, and Sawtooth), gains, sampling rates, wave frequencies, and center frequencies
*Tested hardware capabilities of a node of wave frequency vs sampling rate holding other factors constant
*Learned what WinSCP is and how to use it to get files from Orbit Lab nodes onto a personal laptop
*Figured out how to use WinSCP to transfer supplied code to a node

• Studied and adapted MATLAB code to plot waveforms in the time and frequency domains ^{(Image 2)}
• Began researching OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing)
  

Week 3

*Began sending digital waveforms with modulations (so they could actually carry information) using GNUradio and the benchmark_tx and benchmark_rx programs

• Tested out the differences between various modulations and sampling rates using both rx_ascii_art_dft to see the wavefroms and benchmark_rx to note the quality of the transmission ^{(Image 3)}