A component-based approach to hardware-in-the-loop simulation of radio designing

The hardware-in-the-loop simulation technique is a promising technique which is widely used in many fields such as aviation and Automotive Systems. This kind of technique comprises software and reconfigurable hardware. In this paper, we introduce this technique to the field of radio designing and establish a hardware-in-the-loop radio simulation system. The need of radio system simulation is discussed and analysed. We propose a component-based method to make the simulation technique suitable for the radio designing simulation. We implement the system by python and XML. An example is proposed to show how to use this system. We simulate a radio system called the down link link-level of BRadio which is designed by Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology in this system. The performance of our hardware-in-the-loop radio simulation system can be seen in the last section of this paper. Some key features are measured to see the performance of the platform.