Studies in Software-Defined Radio System Implementation

Over the past decade, software-defined radios (SDRs) have an increasingly prevalent aspect of wireless communication systems. Different than traditional hardware radios which implement radio protocols using static electrical circuit, SDRs implement significant aspects of physical radio protocol using software programs running on a host processor. Because they use software to implement most of the radio functionality, SDRs are much more easily modified, edited, and upgraded than their hardware-defined counterparts. Consequently, researchers and developers have been developing previously hardware-defined radio systems within software. Thus, communication standards can be tested under different conditions or swapped out entirely by simply changing some code. Additionally, developers hope to implement more advanced functionality with SDRs such as cognitive radios that can sense the conditions of the environment and change parameters or protocol accordingly. This paper will outline the major aspects of SDRs including their explanation, advantages, and architecture. As SDRs have become more commonplace, many companies and organizations have developed hardware front-ends and software packages to help develop software radios. The most prominent hardware front-ends to date have been the USRP hardware boards. Additionally, many software packages exist for SDR development, including the open source GNU Radio and OSSIE and the closed source Simulink and Labview SDR packages. Using these development tools, researchers have developed many of the most relevant radio standards. This paper will explain the major hardware and software development tools for creating SDRs, and it will explain some of the most important SDR projects that have been implemented to date

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

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

Computational Complexity of Signal Processing Functions in Software Radio

The increased usage of mobile communication devices has imposed a challenge of achieving efficient communication with minimum power consumption. Moreover, with the advent of software defined radios (SDR), it is highly possible that signal processing functions would be implemented in software in future mobile devices. Hence, the power consumption of these future devices will be directly related to the power consumed by the processor that executes SDR software. This thesis aims at analyzing the computational complexity of different modulation schemes and signal processing communication functions of IEEE WiFi standard. This analysis provides good insight on how the computational load varies at different data rates for different modulation schemes. For this purpose, we have analyzed computational complexity of various modulation schemes and other communication functions using widely known software radio platform i.e. USRP hardware and GNU Radio open source software platform, Matlab and OProfile (open source Linux profiling tool). After performing an extensive analysis, we are able to determine how different modulation schemes and communication functions perform computationally on a given platform. This analysis would help to achieve effective communication along with the efficient use of power in SDR based system

Computational Complexity of Signal Processing Functions in Software Radio

The increased usage of mobile communication devices has imposed a challenge of achieving efficient communication with minimum power consumption. Moreover, with the advent of software defined radios (SDR), it is highly possible that signal processing functions would be implemented in software in future mobile devices. Hence, the power consumption of these future devices will be directly related to the power consumed by the processor that executes SDR software. This thesis aims at analyzing the computational complexity of different modulation schemes and signal processing communication functions of IEEE WiFi standard. This analysis provides good insight on how the computational load varies at different data rates for different modulation schemes. For this purpose, we have analyzed computational complexity of various modulation schemes and other communication functions using widely known software radio platform i.e. USRP hardware and GNU Radio open source software platform, Matlab and OProfile (open source Linux profiling tool). After performing an extensive analysis, we are able to determine how different modulation schemes and communication functions perform computationally on a given platform. This analysis would help to achieve effective communication along with the efficient use of power in SDR based system

Handling Inherent Delays in Virtual IoT Gateways

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)

Computational Complexity of Signal Processing Functions in Software Radio

The increased usage of mobile communication devices has imposed a challenge of achieving efficient communication with minimum power consumption. Moreover, with the advent of software defined radios (SDR), it is highly possible that signal processing functions would be implemented in software in future mobile devices. Hence, the power consumption of these future devices will be directly related to the power consumed by the processor that executes SDR software. This thesis aims at analyzing the computational complexity of different modulation schemes and signal processing communication functions of IEEE WiFi standard. This analysis provides good insight on how the computational load varies at different data rates for different modulation schemes. For this purpose, we have analyzed computational complexity of various modulation schemes and other communication functions using widely known software radio platform i.e. USRP hardware and GNU Radio open source software platform, Matlab and OProfile (open source Linux profiling tool). After performing an extensive analysis, we are able to determine how different modulation schemes and communication functions perform computationally on a given platform. This analysis would help to achieve effective communication along with the efficient use of power in SDR based system