IPS Lab Research Facilities

The IPS Laboratory test and hardware facilities are located in four rooms comprising 1,510 square feet in the Dreese Laboratories building. Laboratory space houses computer facilities and test equipment to support research in communications and signal processing.

The wireless communications laboratory in DL520 houses a multi-antenna 220 MHz transmitter system with experimental FCC license; a MIMO array is located atop the eight-story Dreese Laboratory. RF laboratory equipment includes a Tektronix DSA/DPO70000 Series Digital Phosphor Oscilloscope (12.5 GHz bandwidth and 50 GS/s real time sampling rate, with 250MSample memory on four channels), Tektronix arbitrary waveform generator (two channel digital coherent waveform generation, 7.5 GHz RF bandwidth, DAC with 24 GS/sec rate for direct RF), two Texas Instrument Small Form Factor Software Defined Radio Platforms for implementing custom transmitter/receiver design prototyping, HP 89441A vector signal, analyzer, TAS 4500FLEX RF channel emulator, HP 8594E spectrum analyzer, HP 1660CS logic analyzer, and function generators. The laboratory supports software-defined radar and communications research.

Wireless body sensor network (WBSN) laboratory supports development of microsensor nodes and monitoring stations. Nodes are equipped with Zigbee and Bluetooth transceivers for wireless monitoring and in-situ processing of physiological signals (ECG, PPG, galvanic skin response, surface temperature, activity, and posture). The lab also houses a research grade BIOPAC Medical Data Acquisition and analysis system for standardized wired measurement of physiological signals for cross-validating wireless micro-sensor node measurements. WBSN Lab equipment includes Agilent MS07104A (5Gs/sec 4 Analog, 16 Digital Channel) Mixed Signal Scope) and Agilent U1604A Handheld Digital Scope for prototype development.

A reconfigurable acoustic array testbed includes high-fidelity microphones (Knowles BL1994) and a National Instruments data acquisition system (SCXI-1140, 8 channel simultaneous sample-and-hold, SCXI-1141 8-channel programmable anti-aliasing filter, and AI-16E-4 16-channel, 12-bit ADC). Single-axis (GeoSpace GS-14L3) and triple-axis (GeoSpace GS-20DM) geophones are also available to support seismic signal processing experiments. A custom wireless data acquisition system based on the Stargate processor enables distributed acoustic-seismic signal acquisition and array processing.

Computing equipment includes fifteen HP workstations, ten PC workstations, printers, and scanners. An ITAR computing facility is housed in DL717, with two workstations and several terabytes disk space for data storage. Our ITAR data products have been delivered to AFRL/RY and used by AFRL contractors. In addition, IPS researchers have significant resource allocations at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), including access to the Glenn cluster. Glenn includes 877 dual socket Opteron nodes each with 8 gigabytes of local memory, 88 quad Operator nodes with between 16 and 64 gigabytes of local memory, and a set of IBM cell processors for algorithm development. The full cluster can complete 22 trillion floating point operators per second and provides ample storage for large data sets through connectivity to the OSC Mass Storage Environment.

Rahul Srivastava/srivastr@ece.osu.edu