Academic literature on the topic 'Software Defined Radio (SDR)'

This thesis focuses on a user-friendly software-defined radio (SDR) development workflow for prototyping, research and education in wireless communications and networks. Specifically, a Simulink interface to the Universal Software Radio Peripheral 2(USRP2) SDR platform is devised in order to enable over-the-air data transmission and reception using a Simulink signal source and sink, in addition to controlling a subset of the hardware resources of the USRP2 platform. Using the USRP2 as the RF front end, this interface will use Simulink for software radio development and signal processing libraries of the digital baseband component of the communication transceiver design. This combination of hardware and software will enable the rapid design, implementation, and verification of digital communications systems in simulation, while allowing the user to easily test the system with near real time over-the-air transmission. The use of Simulink and MATLAB for communication transceiver development will provide streaming access to the USRP2 without the steep learning curve associated with current workflows. These widely available software packages and the USRP2 will make digital communication system prototyping both affordable yet highly versatile, enabling researchers and industry engineers to conduct studies into new wireless communications and networking architectures including cognitive radio. Furthermore, the interface will allow users to become familiar with tools used in industry while learning communications and networking concepts.

<p>Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a conception of implementing radio functions in computer software, instead of having electronics performing the functions. This thesis aims to compare two different ways of implementing these functions, or waveforms.</p><p>The Software Communications Architecture (SCA) is an open standard developed by the United States Department of Defense. It uses a CORBA interface environment to make waveform applications interoperable and platform independent. This method of developing SDR is compared to an open-source initiative going by the name GNU Radio.</p><p>Two waveform applications are developed, one transmitter using SCA, and one receiver using GNU Radio. The analog radio interface is simulated using the sound cards of two regular PCs. The development is done using the C++ and Python programming languages.</p><p>This thesis examines pros and cons of the two SDR methods, as well as performing studies of Software Defined Radio in general.</p>

Digital communications devices designed with application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology suffer from one very significant limitation�the integrated circuits are not programmable. Therefore, deploying a new algorithm or an updated standard requires new hardware. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) solve this problem by introducing what is essentially reconfigurable hardware. Thus, digital communications devices designed on FPGAs are capable of accommodating multiple communications protocols without the need to deploy new hardware, and can support new protocols in a matter of seconds. In addition, FPGAs provide a means to update systems that are physical difficult to access. For these reasons, FPGAs provide us with an ideal platform for implementing adaptive communications algorithms. This thesis focuses on using FPGAs to implement an adaptive digital communications system. Using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) as a base, this thesis aims to create a highly-adaptive, plug and play software-defined radio (SDR) that fits CubeSat form-factor satellites. Such a radio platform would enable CubeSat engineers to develop new satellites faster and with lower costs. This thesis presents a new system, the COSMIAC CubeSat SDR, that adapts the USRP platform to better suit the space and power limitations of a CubeSat.

The design and development of a software defined radio (SDR) receiver prototype has been completed. The goal is to replace the existing automatic identification system (AIS) manufactured by Vesper Marine with a software driven system that reduces costs and provides a high degree of reconfigurability. One of the key concepts of the SDR is the consideration of directly digitizing the radio frequency (RF) signal using subsampling. This idea arises from the ambition to implement an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) as close to the antenna interface as practically possible. Thus, majority of the RF processing is encapsulated within in the digital domain. Evaluation of a frequency planning strategy that utilizes a combination of subsampling and oversampling will illustrate how the maritime bandwidth is aliased to a lower frequency. An analog front-end (AFE) board was constructed to implement the frequency planning strategy so that the digitized bandwidth can be streamed into a field programmable gate array (FPGA) for real-time processing. Research is shown on digital front-end (DFE) techniques that condition the digitized maritime signal for baseband processing. The process of a digital down converter (DDC) is conducted by an FPGA, which acquired the in-phase and quadrature signals. By implementing a digital signal processor (DSP) for baseband processing, demodulation on an AIS test signal is evaluated. The SDR prototype achieved a receiver sensitivity of -113dBm, outperforming the required sensitivity of -107dBm specified in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 62287-1 standard for AIS applications [1].

In this thesis, we benchmark the Cognitive Radios Test System version 2.0 (CRTSv.2) to analyze its software performance with respect to its internal structure and design choices. With the help of system monitoring and profiling tools, CRTSv.2 is tested to quantitatively evaluate its features and understand its shortcomings. With the help of GNU Radio, a popular, easy-to-use software radios framework, we ascertain that CRTSv.2 has a low memory footprint, fewer dependencies and overall, is a lightweight framework that can potentially be used for real-time signal processing. Several open-source measurement tools such as valgrind, perf, top, etc. are used to evaluate the CPU utilization, memory footprint and to postulate the origins of latencies. Based on our evaluation, we observe that CRTSv.2 shows a CPU utilization of approximately 9% whereas GNU Radio is 59%. CRTSv.2 has lower heap memory consumption of approximately 3MB to GNU Radio's 25MB. This study establishes a methodology to evaluate the performance of two SDR frameworks systematically and quantitatively.<br>Master of Science<br>When picking the best person for the job, we rely on the person's performance in past projects of a similar nature. The same can be said for software. Software radios provide the capability to perform signal processing functions in software, making them prime candidates towards solving modern problems such as spectrum scarcity, internet-of-things(IoT) adoption, vehicle-to-vehicle communication etc. In order to operate and configure software radios, software frameworks are provided that let the user make changes to the waveform, perform signal processing and data management. In this thesis, we consider two such frameworks,GNU Radio and CRTSv.2. A software performance evaluation is conducted to assess framework overheads contributing to operation of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) digital modulation scheme. This provides a quantitative analysis of a signals-specific use case which can be used by researchers to evaluate the optimal framework for research. This analysis can be generalized for different signal processing capabilities by understanding the total framework overhead removed from signal processing costs.

High cost is a current problem with modern radar systems. Software-defined radios (SDRs) offer a possible solution for low-cost customizable radar systems. An SDR is a radio communi- cation system where, instead of the traditional radio components implemented in hardware, many of the components are implemented in software on a computer or embedded system. Although SDRs were originally designed for wireless communication systems, the firmware of an SDR can be configured into a radar system. With new companies entering the market, various types of low- cost SDRs have emerged. This thesis explores the use of a LimeSDR-Mini in a short-range radar through open software tools and custom code. The LimeSDR-Mini is successfully shown to detect targets at a short range. However, due to the instability of the LimeSDR-Mini, the consistent detection of a target is not possible. This thesis shows how the LimeSDR is characterized and how timing synchronization and instability issues are mitigated. The LimeSDR-Mini falls short of operating reliable in a radar system and other SDR boards need to be explored as viable options. Test setups using coaxial cables and test setups using antennas in an outdoor environment show the instability of the LimeSDR-Mini. The transmitter and the receiver are asynchronous. The timing difference varies slightly from run to run, which results in issues that are exacerbated in a short-range radar. The bleed-through signal is the signal leakage from the transmitter to the receiver. The bleed-through signal prevents the detection of targets at a short-range. Feed-through nulling is a signal processing technique used to eliminate the bleed-through signal so that short- range targets can be detected. The instability of the LimeSDR-Mini reduces the effectiveness of feed-through nulling techniques.

<p>CMMB (China Multimedia Mobile Broadingcasting) is a wireless broadcastingchannel standard for low bandwidth, low cost hand-held digital TV is adopted byall continental Chinese government TV broadcasting companies and some HongKong private TV broadcasting companies. The business potential is high, yet thefuture is hard to predict because it might be replaced by GB200600 or DTMB. Thedigital modulation is based on OFDM with pilot supporting channel estimationand equalization and CP supporting multi-path induced ISI problems.This thesis investigates the implement a CMMB system using a SDR platform.Simulation chain was implemented using MATLAB with full data precision includingCMMB transmitter and receiver. The transmitter behavior model includes RSencoder, LDPC encoder, OFDM modulation, etc. The receiver behavior modelincludes OFDM demodulation, channel estimation, channel equalization, LDPCdecoder, RS decoder, etc. Different channel models emulating pathloss, whitenoise, multi-path, and glitch were modeled. Based on the simulation chain andchannel models, T-domain, F-domain channel estimator and equalizer were implemented,optimized. Optimized TD-FD models for different mobility scenarioswere proposed. The focus of the thesis is on 2D (FD-TD) channel estimation andequalization.</p>

The ability to use Software Defined Radio (SDR) in the civilian mobile applications will make it possible for the next generation of mobile devices to handle multi-standard personal wireless devices and ubiquitous wireless devices. The original military standard created many beneficial characteristics for SDR, but resulted in a number of disadvantages as well. Many challenges in commercializing SDR are still the subject of interest in the software radio research community. Four main issues that have been already addressed are performance, size, weight, and power. This investigation presents an in-depth study of SDR inter-components communications in terms of total link delay related to the number of components and packet sizes in systems based on Software Communication Architecture (SCA). The study is based on the investigation of the controlled environment platform. Results suggest that the total link delay does not linearly increase with the number of components and the packet sizes. The closed form expression of the delay was modeled using a logistic function in terms of the number of components and packet sizes. The model performed well when the number of components was large. Based upon the mobility applications, energy consumption has become one of the most crucial limitations. SDR will not only provide flexibility of multi-protocol support, but this desirable feature will also bring a choice of mobile protocols. Having such a variety of choices available creates a problem in the selection of the most appropriate protocol to transmit. An investigation in a real-time algorithm to optimize energy efficiency was also performed. Communication energy models were used including switching estimation to develop a waveform selection algorithm. Simulations were performed to validate the concept.

SDRs have emerged as a viable approach for space communications over the last decade by delivering low-cost hardware and flexible software solutions. The flexibility introduced by the SDR concept not only allows the realisation of concurrent multiple standards on one platform, but also promises to ease the implementation of one communication standard on differing SDR platforms by signal porting. This technology would facilitate implementing reconfigurable nodes for parallel satellite reception in Mobile/Deployable Ground Segments and Distributed Satellite Systems (DSS) for amateur radio/university satellite operations. This work outlines the recent advances in embedded technologies that can enable new communication architectures for concurrent multi-satellite or satellite-to-ground missions where multi-link challenges are associated. This research proposes a novel concept to run advanced parallelised SDR back-end technologies in a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) embedded system that can support multi-signal processing for multi-satellite scenarios simultaneously. The initial SDR implementation could support only one receiver chain due to system saturation. However, the design was optimised to facilitate multiple signals within the limited resources available on an embedded system at any given time. This was achieved by providing a VHDL solution to the existing Python and C/C++ programming languages along with parallelisation so as to accelerate performance whilst maintaining the flexibility. The improvement in the performance was validated at every stage through profiling. Various cases of concurrent multiple signals with different standards such as frequency (with Doppler effect) and symbol rates were simulated in order to validate the novel architecture proposed in this research. Also, the architecture allows the system to be reconfigurable by providing the opportunity to change the communication standards in soft real-time. The chosen COTS solution provides a generic software methodology for both ground and space applications that will remain unaltered despite new evolutions in hardware, and supports concurrent multi-standard, multi-channel and multi-rate telemetry signals.

Thesis (M.S. in Electrical Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2009.<br>Thesis Advisor(s): Kragh, Frank ; Loomis, Herschel. "March 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 24, 2009. Author(s) subject terms: Software Defined Radio, SDR, Field Programmable Gate Array, FPGA, Signal Compression. Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-106). Also available in print.