56 research outputs found

    A review on various types of Software Defined Radios (SDRs) in radio communication

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    Software Defined Radio (SDR) promises to deliver a cost effective and flexible solution by implementing a wide variety of wireless protocols in software. The SDR became more popular in recent years because of its abilities to realize many applications without a lot of efforts in the integration of different component. This software based radio device allows engineers to add more features to the communication system and implement any number of different signal processing elements or protocols without changing the original system hardware and its architecture. It provides a customizable and portable communications platform for many applications, including the prototyping and realization of wireless protocols and their performances. It is also able to interface with a separate hardware module to communicate over a real channel. In this article we described and compared the various SDRs that currently has been using by the researchers to study the performance of wireless protocol. Among the SDRs that we focused in this article are USRP, SORA, Air blue, SODA, and WARP

    Handling Inherent Delays in Virtual IoT Gateways

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    15th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS)Massive deployment of diverse ultra-low power wireless devices in different application areas has given rise to a plethora of heterogeneous architectures and communication protocols. It is challenging to provide convergent access to these miscellaneous collections of communicating devices. In this paper, we propose VGATE, an edge-based virtualized IoT gateway for bringing these devices together in a single framework using SDRs as technology agnostic radioheads. SDR platforms, however, suffer from large unpredictable delays. We design a GNU Radio-based IEEE 802.15.4 experimental setup using LimeSDR, where the data path is time-stamped at various points of interest to get a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of the delays. Our analysis shows that GNU Radio processing and LimeSDR buffering delays are the major delays. We decrease the LimeSDR buffering delay by decreasing the USB transfer size but show that this comes at the cost of increased processing overhead. We modify the USB transfer packet size to investigate which USB transfer size provides the best balance between buffering delay and processing overhead across two different host computers. Our experiments show that for the best measured configuration the mean and jitter of latency decreases by 37% and 40% respectively for the host computer with higher processing resources. We also show that the throughput is not affected by these modifications.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586)

    Design and Development of a Testbed Prototype for Cognitive Radio Transmission over TV White Space

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    Considering the ever-increasing demand and the associated high costs of wireless electromagnetic spectrum, technologies that can facilitate efficient spectrum utilization are of utmost importance. Cognitive radio (CR), in conjunction with TV White Spaces (TVWS), can be a viable solution, where unlicensed or secondary users can opportunistically use the not-currently-in-use, aka idle, TV channels registered to licensed or primary users. This thesis focuses on the design and development of a testbed prototype for real-time testing of secondary user transmission in TVWS. Once an unused TV channel has been identified, our system uses that idle channel for transmitting and receiving signals. The testbed is built on Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) device powered by GNU Radio Software, Software Defined Radio (SDR) receptor, and Spectrum Analyser. The developed prototype splits a given TVWS channel into multiple small sub-channels and performs channel characterization through end-to-end transmission and reception of information carrying signals. The channel characteristics are presented through Bit Transfer Rate (BTR) and frequency spectrum results. The prototype also facilitates provisions for applying error correction coding as a mean of undertaking comparative performance testing

    Reconfigurable Antenna Systems: Platform implementation and low-power matters

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    Antennas are a necessary and often critical component of all wireless systems, of which they share the ever-increasing complexity and the challenges of present and emerging trends. 5G, massive low-orbit satellite architectures (e.g. OneWeb), industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT), satcom on-the-move, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles, all call for highly flexible systems, and antenna reconfigurability is an enabling part of these advances. The terminal segment is particularly crucial in this sense, encompassing both very compact antennas or low-profile antennas, all with various adaptability/reconfigurability requirements. This thesis work has dealt with hardware implementation issues of Radio Frequency (RF) antenna reconfigurability, and in particular with low-power General Purpose Platforms (GPP); the work has encompassed Software Defined Radio (SDR) implementation, as well as embedded low-power platforms (in particular on STM32 Nucleo family of micro-controller). The hardware-software platform work has been complemented with design and fabrication of reconfigurable antennas in standard technology, and the resulting systems tested. The selected antenna technology was antenna array with continuously steerable beam, controlled by voltage-driven phase shifting circuits. Applications included notably Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployed in the Italian scientific mission in Antarctica, in a traffic-monitoring case study (EU H2020 project), and into an innovative Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) antenna concept (patent application submitted). The SDR implementation focused on a low-cost and low-power Software-defined radio open-source platform with IEEE 802.11 a/g/p wireless communication capability. In a second embodiment, the flexibility of the SDR paradigm has been traded off to avoid the power consumption associated to the relevant operating system. Application field of reconfigurable antenna is, however, not limited to a better management of the energy consumption. The analysis has also been extended to satellites positioning application. A novel beamforming method has presented demonstrating improvements in the quality of signals received from satellites. Regarding those who deal with positioning algorithms, this advancement help improving precision on the estimated position

    a PC based SDR platform with dynamic reconfiguration

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    The goal of this Major Qualifying Project is to provide the framework for integration of a Virtex series field programmable gate array (FPGA) into GNU Radio, allowing GNU Radio to have control over both FPGA and non-FPGA components of the pipeline. In this report, we address the following: our research into the which FPGA series would be most beneficial to our project, an outline of the evolution of our design over the course of the past 21 weeks, and a summary of the final outcomes in various subsets of project development

    Development and testing of the RHINO host streamed data acquisition framework

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    This project focuses on developing a supporting framework for integrating the Reconfigurable Hardware INterface for computing and radiO (RHINO) with a Personal Computer (PC) host in order to facilitate the development of Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications built using a hybrid RHINO/multicore PC system. The supporting framework that is the focus of this dissertation is designed around two main parts: a) resources for integrating the GNU Radio framework with the RHINO platform to allow data streams to be sent from RHINO to be processed by GNU Radio, and b) a concise and highly efficient C code module with accompanying Application Program Interface (API) that will receive streamed data from RHINO and provide data marshalling facilities to gather and dispatch blocks of data for further processing using C/C++ routines. The methodology followed in this research project involves investigating real-time streaming techniques using User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, furthermore, investigating how GNU Radio high-level SDR development framework can be integrated into the real-time data acquisition systems such as in the case of this project with RHINO. The literature for real-time processing requirements for the streamer framework was reviewed. The guidelines to implement a high performance, low latency and maximum throughput for streaming will consequently be presented and the proposed design motivated. The results achieved demonstrate an efficient data streaming system. The objectives of implementing RHINO data acquisition system through integration with standard C/C++ code and GNU Radio were satisfactorily met. The system was tested with real-time Radio Frequency (RF) demodulation. The system captures a pair of an In-phase/Quadrature signal (I/Q) sample at a time, which is one packet. The results show that data can be streamed from the RHINO board to GNU Radio over GbE with a minimum capturing latency of 10.2μs for 2 0 packet size and an average data capturing throughput of 0.54 Mega Bytes per second (MBps). The capturing latency, in this case, is the time taken from the time of the request to receiving the data. The FM receiver case study successfully demonstrated results of a demodulated FM signal of a 94.5 Mega Hetz (MHz) radio station. Further recommendations include making use of the 10GbE port on RHINO for data streaming purposes. 10GbE port on RHINO can be used together with GNU Radio to improve the speed of the RHINO streamer

    Facilitating wireless coexistence research

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    Experimental analysis and proof-of-concept of distributed mechanisms for local area wireless networks

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    A High-speed Reconfigurable Free Space Optical Communication System Utilizing Software Defined Radio Environment

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    Free space optical (FSO) communication allows for high-speed data transmissions while also being extremely cost-effective by using visible or infrared wavelengths to transmit and receive data wirelessly through the free space channel. However, FSO links are highly susceptible to the effects of the atmosphere, particularly turbulence, smoke, and fog. On the other hand, FSO itself does not provide enough flexibility to address the issue of such blockage and obstruction caused by objects and atmospheric conditions. This research investigates, proposes, and evaluates a software defined multiple input multiple output (MIMO) FSO system to ensure link availability and reliability under weather conditions as part of the last mile access in the 5th generation, 6th generation, and beyond. Software defined radio (SDR) technology is adopted in order to provide a certain degree of flexibility to the optical wireless communications system. The scope of this research focuses on the design, validation, implementation, and evaluation of a novel adaptive switching algorithm i.e., activating additional transmitters of a MIMO FSO system using a software defined ecosystem. The main issues are the compactness of the experimental design; the limitation of software-oriented signal generation; robustness; reliability; and the quality of service. As part of the system design, the thresholding method, a decision-making process via the feedback link, and a spatial diversity technique is adopted to carry out the adaptive switching. The adaptive switching is performed via a feedback link in which the atmospheric loss and scintillation index are calculated for fog and turbulence respectively. The initial design is implemented in SDR/ GNURadio for a real-time emulation of the proposed system to enhance the system flexibility of a traditional MIMO FSO system. A bit-by-bit comparison is performed with the GNURadio signal processing block and BERT for a real-time BER estimation. However, based on the initial results, the switching mechanism can only overcome the effect of turbulence at a certain level. A new design to mainly mitigate the varying fog conditions is proposed based on the SDR-based adaptive switching for a gigabit ethernet (GbE) MIMO FSO system and tested in a 5 m dedicated atmospheric chamber. The proposed system is implemented using off-the-shelf components such as a media converter, small form pluggable transceivers, optical switch, and power meter to estimate the channel state information. A new Schmitt trigger-based thresholding method is also introduced. The proposed software defined GbE MIMO FSO with an adaptive switching algorithm is fabricated, implemented, and investigated. The results are also compared with the real-time simulated data. Since the purpose of this Ph.D. is to explain and demonstrate the proof of concept for the proposed SDR-MIMO FSO system, the emphasis has been on the design, evaluation, and minimal performance requirements rather than maximizing the data rate. The outcome of the thesis will be a huge degree of flexibility and mitigation property MIMO FSO can offer with the help of SDR. It will be shown that the designed system has the capability to provide data transmission with 99.999% availability with a packet error rate and data rate of 7.2 ×10−2 and ~120 Mbps respectively, under extremely harsh fog conditions with visibility V of < 11 m

    Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

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    The Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted much attention from society, industry and academia as a promising technology that can enhance day to day activities, and the creation of new business models, products and services, and serve as a broad source of research topics and ideas. A future digital society is envisioned, composed of numerous wireless connected sensors and devices. Driven by huge demand, the massive IoT (mIoT) or massive machine type communication (mMTC) has been identified as one of the three main communication scenarios for 5G. In addition to connectivity, computing and storage and data management are also long-standing issues for low-cost devices and sensors. The book is a collection of outstanding technical research and industrial papers covering new research results, with a wide range of features within the 5G-and-beyond framework. It provides a range of discussions of the major research challenges and achievements within this topic
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