Transmission characteristics of OFDM packets in 5 GHz band using USRP

In this paper, an experiment is conducted to transmit and receive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated packets in the 5 GHz band with a software defined radio (SDR) platform composed of universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) and GNU Radio. The OFDM modulation is complied with the 1:4 scale model of IEEE 802.11a standard. The observed OFDM signals do not satisfy the spectral mask of IEEE 802.11a standard so that an overlapped windowing will be required to satisfy it. The experimental results show that the received sensitivity of -59 dBm attains at the packet error rate (PER) of 1% when subcarriers are modulated by quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and the received sensitivity of -61 dBm attains at 1% PER when subcarriers are modulated by binary PSK (BPSK).