Demonstration of a 1.2 Gbps Always-on Fully-Connected Mesh Network with RFSoC SDRs

2026-03-02

AI Summary

This work presents a fully connected four-node wireless mesh network based on the Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC platform to support multi-stream, real-time, uncompressed 4K video transmission. By designing a custom physical and MAC layer within a shared 200 MHz bandwidth, the system achieves, for the first time, a low-latency, digitally controlled frequency-division duplexing 2×2 MIMO link with runtime dynamic reconfiguration capability. The implementation concurrently operates twelve 99.84 Mbps links, delivering an aggregate throughput of 1.2 Gbps—sufficient to transmit multiple synchronized 4K video streams. Furthermore, the platform provides real-time visualization and monitoring of key performance metrics, including error vector magnitude (EVM), signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and bit error rate (BER).

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

We design and implement on Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) software-defined radios (SDRs) a complete-graph network of four unmanned aerial vehicles and demonstrate real-time 4K video streaming over twelve always-on 2x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links. The testbed operates at an aggregate network throughput of approximately 1.2 Gbps (i.e., 12 links of 99.84 Mbps) across a shared bandwidth of 200 MHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of low-latency digitally controlled frequency-division duplex (FDD) RFSoC-based MIMO wireless links capable of simultaneously supporting multiple real-time, uncompressed 4K video streams. The testbed consists of four AMD/Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC ZCU111 evaluation kits configured as a fully-connected mesh network with custom-built physical and medium-access-control layers, adaptive equalization, and adjacent-band filtering implemented entirely in RFSoC's programmable logic. A host-side graphical user interface (GUI) provides real-time visualization of each link's performance including error vector magnitude (EVM), pre-detection signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and bit error rate (BER), and enables dynamic reconfiguration of link parameters during operation.

Problem

• RFSoC
• MIMO
• mesh network
• 4K video streaming
• FDD

Innovation

• RFSoC
• MIMO
• fully-connected mesh network
• frequency-division duplex (FDD)
• software-defined radio (SDR)