A USRP-Based Multi-Antenna Testbed for Reception of Multi-Site Cellular Signals

This paper presents a design of a Software Defined Radio (SDR) multi-antenna testbed able to record live cellular signals from multiple sites. This measurement setup based on Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) boards, is used to record live Long Term Evolution (LTE) signals in sub-6 GHz frequency bands. Due to recording of raw I&Q samples, this fully digital testbed is suitable for variety of research activities spanning channel characterization and beamforming performance evaluation. We propose a phase calibration method based on transmission of a single out of band tone to overcome the uncertainty introduced by the USRP's lack of phase alignment. We demonstrate two use cases where the proposed testbed can be used and we validate its performance during two measurement campaigns with self-generated and real cellular signals.