Towards Designing a Microcell Base Station using a Software-Defined Radio Platform

In this work, we study the performance of an antenna in microstrip technology designed especially for micro-cellular applications in a real context of mobile radio-telephony. To accomplish this, we designed an indoor cellular test network and implemented basic functions of the GSM protocol, by using Open Base Transceiver Station (OpenBTS): an open-source cellular infrastructure that uses Software Defined Radio (SDR) as a platform. Our proposed prototype is based on the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) device from National Instrument that is designed to operate in the sub-6 GHz band. Finally, a preliminary test of the Quality of Service (QoS) has been quarried-out by measuring the Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) between the deployed Base Station and the connected mobile stations (MS), and that for different scenarios and distances.