AT&T Labs Research — Leading Invention, Driving Innovation

Eric Rozner is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs - Research. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin and his B.S. in Computer Science from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests focus on wireless network management and mobility-related applications and services.

This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 2012. , 2013-02-24

{As more wireless systems are deployed in many new environments with different antenna heights, frequency bands, and multipath conditions, there are increasing demands for making more channel measurements to better understand wireless propagation and assist deployment engineering. We design and implement a rapid wireless channel sounding sys- tem using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platform and GNU Radio software to address these demands. Our approach incorporates the simultaneous measurement of channel propagation characteristics from multiple transmitters. The system consists of multiple battery-powered reference signal transmitters and battery-powered receivers that can discriminate the transmitters. This enables the rapid set-up of the channel sounder at a field location and expedited measurements by analyzing multiple reference signals during a single walk or drive through the environment. In this paper, we describe our initial design and implementation of this rapid channel sounding system. We expect that the proposed approach, with a few further refinements, can transform the propagation measurement as a routine part of day-to-day wireless network engineering.}