Citation

Abstract

In this thesis a cost-effective means to gain access to wireless communication channels is proposed and implemented. A testbed is created using mostly commercial of-the-shelf components, and the signal processing is implemented in an Altera® DE-3 development board, which includes Altera®'s Stratix III® field programmable gate array, as well as two Terasic® ADA boards which provide analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions. Modulation and demodulation was performed on both the forward and reverse channels to bring the signals to an intermediate frequency such that no low pass filter was needed before the signal was acquired by the development board. Testing showed that the CDMA power-control algorithm was able to perform within acceptable limits, and that the implemented system was nearly transparent to both the mobile and the base station. To demonstrate how the system could be used, non-uniform sampling was also implemented in a variety of ways, which included a simple method of incrementally introducing noise.

Acknowledgements of Funding

This research was supported by the Atlantic Innovation Fund from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, and by Bell Aliant, our industrial partner.

Thesis