An advanced hardware platform to verify 5G wireless communication concepts

Verification of first 5G concepts of a new air interface with real hardware prototypes is challenging. In this paper, we highlight a flexible software-defined radio (SDR) platform which can be used to implement novel 5G communication concepts. The proposed software and hardware architecture was previously used to implement early LTE-Advanced features, e.g. flexible multiband carrier-aggregation (CA). Furthermore, the prototype was used for transmission experiments of new multi carrier waveforms. The proposed setup allows early proof-of-concepts (PoC) by extending hardware-in-the-loop (HILO) experiments to small laboratory experiments and finally real outdoor test trials of a novel 5G air interface and concepts.