Development of a Software-Defined Underwater Acoustic Communication System

This report started with a brief history and recent development of underwater acoustic communication systems as well as software-defined radio technologies. Then, some challenges from underwater acoustic channels and available underwater acoustic communication modems are discussed. After finished introducing the basics of SDR and GNU Radio, a detailed description of implementing a software-defined acoustic communication system in GNU Radio are presented, along with some key concepts of the system. Then, some hardware specifications are presented, following by detailed documentation on a software-defined acoustic communication system experiment with a host computer, a USRP, an acoustic hydrophone, and a hydrophone. At the end of Section 4, the results of the experiment are discussed. Lastly, the conclusions of this report are made. Some possible directions for future work are suggested in Section 6

Cognitive Radio-Modulation and Demodulation

The reconfigurability in Cognitive Radio (CR) facilitates to dynamically change its parameters for the efficient spectrum utilization. The motivation behind the study of cognitive radio is that the number of different radio signals can be handled without using extra circuitry, i.e., reusing identical hardware with the change in the software will reduce time to market, development cost, and upgrade infrastructure. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an enabling technology for Cognitive Radio (CR); therefore, it emphasizes on SDR unique features, characteristics, and basics concepts that are required to understand operation of SDR. SDR allows service providers to upgrade infrastructure without unreasonable cost. Modulation techniques play a vital role in any communication systems such as cable modems, DSL modems, CDMA, 4G, Wi-Fi, and WIMAX; thus, it emphasizes on implementation of modulation techniques using SDR Generic hardware, which is operated by Open Source software called GNU Radio. Implementation of various analog and digital modulation techniques using the GNU Radio provides a way for developing advanced wireless communication system. GNU Radio software is a highly flexible signal processing platform, which makes it easy and reduces time to implement different modulation techniques with appropriate script

Nomadic Base Station (NBS): a Software Defined Radio (SDR) based Architecture for Capacity Enhancement in Mobile Communications Networks

In this research work, the problem of congestion that leads to dropped calls at GSM cell sites and drastic reduction in network capacity is addressed. We designed a novel GSM base station architecture named Nomadic Base Station (NBS) which is based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) architecture and simulated the LNA for its receiver front-end. The NBS receiver LNA selects and amplifies GSM signal bursts operating at 900MHz and 1800MHz Radio Frequency Band. The later stages translate the Radio Frequency (RF) signal to Intermediate Frequency (IF) signal. This implements the SDR technology by digitizing the IF signal into bit streams that can be processed on generic Central Processing Unit (CPU) using custom written signal processing software

A Software-Defined Channel Sounder for Industrial Environments with Fast Time Variance

Novel industrial wireless applications require wideband, real-time channel characterization due to complex multipath propagation. Rapid machine motion leads to fast time variance of the channel's reflective behavior, which must be captured for radio channel characterization. Additionally, inhomogeneous radio channels demand highly flexible measurements. Existing approaches for radio channel measurements either lack flexibility or wide-band, real-time performance with fast time variance. In this paper, we propose a correlative channel sounding approach utilizing a software-defined architecture. The approach enables real-time, wide-band measurements with fast time variance immune to active interference. The desired performance is validated with a demanding industrial application example.Comment: Submitted to the 15th International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS 2018

Towards generic satellite payloads: software radio

Satellite payloads are becoming much more complex with the evolution towards multimedia applications. Moreover satellite lifetime increases while standard and services evolve faster, necessitating a hardware platform that can evolves for not developing new systems on each change. The same problem occurs in terrestrial systems like mobile networks and a foreseen solution is the software defined radio technology. In this paper we describe a way of introducing this concept at satellite level to offer to operators the required flexibility in the system. The digital functions enabling this technology, the hardware components implementing the functions and the reconfiguration processes are detailed. We show that elements of the software radio for satellites exist and that this concept is feasible