State-of-the-art wireless Gateways (GW) used in Internet of Things (IoT) offer a single channel radio link, which limits the capabilities of the IoT network controlled by the GW, as the GW can only use a single channel at a time to communicate with the end-device(s). The quality of service (e.g., aggregate throughput, latency) offered by a single channel GW could be substantially improved by employing a multi-channel transceiver, which is capable of transmitting/receiving data on different radio channels simultaneously, particularly for larger wireless networks. However, current solutions available in both research and commercial communities only offer multi-channel receiver capabilities, and do not incorporate the multi-channel transmitter part. In addition, in terms of implementation, these multi-channel receivers duplicate single-channel hardware functionality. In this paper, for the first time, a novel concurrent multi-channel virtual transceiver is introduced. The virtual transceiver offers multi-channel capabilities and uses the same single-hardware hardware implementation for the Physical (PHY) layer by employing the virtualization technique. This new virtual transceiver concept is demonstrated for an IEEE 802.15.4 based 8 × 8 channel transceiver, implemented on an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) of a modern Software Defined Radio and is compared with the existing duplication approach. The duplication approach consumes 9008 LUTs, and 12120 FFs, whereas the proposed approach occupies only 2959 LUTs and 2105 FFs, saving 67.15% LUTs and 82.63% FFs in comparison with the duplication approach. The experimental results reveal that the virtual transceiver provides the same performance (e.g., receiver sensitivity of −98.5dBm) as the transceiver achieved by duplicating the PHY layers but consumes much less hardware resources.

物联网（IoT）中使用的最先进的无线网关（GW）提供单通道无线电链路，这限制了GW控制的IoT网络的功能，因为GW只能在以下位置使用单个通道与终端设备进行通信的时间。通过使用多信道收发器，可以显着改善单信道GW提供的服务质量（例如，总吞吐量，等待时间），该收发器能够同时在不同的无线电信道上发送/接收数据，特别是对于较大的无线网络。但是，研究和商业社区中可用的当前解决方案仅提供多通道接收器功能，并且不包含多通道发射器部分。此外，在实施方面，这些多通道接收器复制了单通道硬件功能。本文首次介绍了一种新颖的并发多通道虚拟收发器。虚拟收发器提供多通道功能，并通过采用虚拟化技术，对物理（PHY）层使用相同的单硬件硬件实现。这种新的虚拟收发器概念已针对基于IEEE 802.15.4的8×8通道收发器进行了演示，该收发器在现代软件定义无线电的现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）上实现，并与现有复制方法进行了比较。复制方法消耗9008个LUT和12120 FF，而建议的方法仅占用2959个LUT和2105 FF，与复制方法相比，节省了67.15％的LUT和82.63％FF。