NATwireless

The fast-growing number of applications available for wireless service is followed by a growing demand for wireless equipment which can be easily customized for a specific use case.

Today public and private broadband cellular networks are widely used by industries with remote and distributed facilities, research institutions, law enforcement agencies, defense forces, search and rescue organizations, and many more.

These organizations are specifying systems that work with commercial networks and equipment in order to

• protect and guard values, sites and lives by detecting and if necessary, counteracting against wireless threats
• create private networks which can be used with standard devices (i.e. smart phones, tablets) but provide features not delivered with standard base stations
• lower costs by using standard devices and existing infrastructure to access their private networks

In order to facilitate a maximum in flexibility and reliability paired with the ability to quickly react to a fast-changing wireless world, most of these appliances are based on software configurable equipment, also known as Software Defined Radio (SDR).

The concept of a central radio unit which with regards to frequency, bandwidth and signal strength can be entirely configured and controlled by software, ensures that the equipment can be easily tailored to exactly meet the requirements of the respective application.

The NATwireless technology is the solution for the growing demand of easily customizable wireless equipment. The combination of versatile configurable software and flexible adaptable hardware is crucial to meet the market’s rapidly evolving requirements, characterized by:

• Hardware modularity at unit (board) level
• Hardware scalability at system level
• Re-usable software core elements for different use cases

N.A.T.’s Software Defined Radio (SDR) solution is available both as COTS board level product, as well as turn-key system ready for deployment, e.g. as eNB or gNB for private networks.

The heart of the N.A.T. SDR units, NAT-AMC-ZYNQUP-SDR, is a professionally architected Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC), which can be easily integrated into any system hosting AMCs, allowing a flexible and application-specific scaling of the number of RF interfaces. In addition to further SDR units, other AMCs, i.e. special I/O etc. can be selected from the market and easily added through a standardized plug-and-play procedure.

Being a unified development platform in a ready-to-deploy format, the NAT-AMC-ZYNQUP-SDR combines best-in-class hardware with a tailored, comprehensive software package, enabling a broad range of wireless communication applications such as:

• Wide band receiver, i.e. for scanning and direction finding
• Wide band transmitter, i.e. for jamming
• Special test equipment
• Proof-of-concept setups including custom waveforms and beamforming
• Sensing techniques for cognitive radio
• Standard remote radio head (RRH) for phased antenna arrays
• base station for 4G and 5G private networks

To enable customers to immediately start their application design on a ready-to-deploy platform, N.A.T. has defined three turnkey systems available off-the-shelf, each of which allows you to add further NAT-AMC-ZYNQUP-SDR modules. All systems come with a comprehensive software support and documentation package including

• VIVADO® sample projects
• Linux board support package and host driver
• NAT-libraries for 8 channel phase sync operation and low latency streaming of IQ samples
• Getting started guide and user manual
• Hardware and software manuals
• Sample applications for GNUradio and Matlab

The platforms are professionally architected MicroTCA (MTCA) systems and include a complete system management also allowing remote management access. Depending on the system size, the backplane provides either a single or dual star topology which enables customer to choose between non-redundant and fully-redundant system layouts.