System Level Design of Software-Defined Radio Platform

This major qualifying project proposes a new single-board design for a Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) On Board Unit (OBU) which consists of a Zynq 7030 system on a chip and AD9361 wideband transceiver. This software-defined radio (SDR) platform design is based on ZedBoard and FMcomms2. The advantages of this approach compared to the ZedBoard and FMcomms2 joint solution are smaller form factor, front end tuned to 5.9GHz and a more powerful processor. Since the prototype has not been manufactured due to the time constraints of this project, the working implementation of 6GHz DSRC radio 802.11p in GNU Radio has been confirmed on the lower capability hardware USRP2 and USRP N210 (Universal Software Radio Peripheral)

Guidelines for Building Hybrid Applications Based on Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4 Protocols

The study case born due to the lack of information provided in the wireless multiprotocol device KW40Z about the recommendation and overview of application involving two wireless protocols: Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4. This kind of Applications are known as hybrid Applications in this document. This document pertains to provide basic guide lines or recommendations that help wireless applications developers with the design of hybrid applications using Bluetooth Low Energy and non-beacon IEEE 802.15.4 networks. It is divided into five chapters. The introduction begins with the presentation of the case study as well as the issue that is going to be analyzed in this document. Chapter 1 provides an introduction of the Bluetooth Low Energy technology and the basic concepts to understand how it can affect hybrid applications. Chapter 2 gives a short overview of the IEEE 802.15.4 technology with the focus on non-beacon networks. Chapter 3 introduces different schemes of the coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4 and BLE in the 2.4 GHz band. Chapter 4 introduces the hybrid applications and analysis of this kind of applications taking the KW40Z device as an introductory example to analyze hybrid applications. Finally, the document concludes in Chapter 5 with some key recommendations that serves as basic guidelines when designing hybrid applications residing in a multiprotocol device such as the KW40Z from NXP Semiconductors

An improved medium access control protocol for real-time applications in WLANs and its firmware development

The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as Wi-Fi, has emerged as a popular internet access technology and researchers are continuously working on improvement of the quality of service (QoS) in WLAN by proposing new and efficient schemes. Voice and video over Internet Protocol (VVoIP) applications are becoming very popular in Wi-Fi enabled portable/handheld devices because of recent technological advancements and lower service costs. Different from normal voice and video streaming, these applications demand symmetric throughput for the upstream and downstream. Existing Wi-Fi standards are optimised for generic internet applications and fail to provide symmetric throughput due to traffic bottleneck at access points. Performance analysis and benchmarking is an integral part of WLAN research, and in the majority of the cases, this is done through computer simulation using popular network simulators such as Network Simulator ff 2 (NS-2) or OPNET. While computer simulation is an excellent approach for saving time and money, results generated from computer simulations do not always match practical observations. This is why, for proper assessment of the merits of a proposed system in WLAN, a trial on a practical hardware platform is highly recommended and is often a requirement. In this thesis work, with a view to address the abovementioned challenges for facilitating VoIP and VVoIP services over Wi-Fi, two key contributions are made: i) formulating a suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol to address symmetric traffic scenario and ii) firmware development of this newly devised MAC protocol for real WLAN hardware. The proposed solution shows signifocant improvements over existing standards by supporting higher number of stations with strict QoS criteria. The proposed hardware platform is available off-the-shelf in the market and is a cost effective way of generating and evaluating performance results on a hardware system

Porting of the 802.15.4 stack on FreeRTOS in Asymmetric Multi Processing contexts for IoT solutions

L'obiettivo di questa tesi è effettuare il porting dello stack IEEE 802.15.4, che era già stato sviluppato per il sistema operativo Erika EE, all'interno di un ambiente FreeRTOS. Il tutto viene eseguito in un contesto di Asymmetric Multi Processing, al fine di delegare la gestione di reti IoT real-time a processori dedicati, mentre quello principale può occuparsi della gestione di tutte le altre periferiche