Since J. Mitola's work in 1992, Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have been quite a hot topic in wireless systems research. Though many notable achievements were reported in the field, the scarcity of computational power on general purpose CPUs has always constrained their wide adoption in production environments. If conveniently applied within an SDR context, classical concepts known in computer science as space/time tradeoffs can be extremely helpful when trying to mitigate this problem. Inspired by and building on those concepts, this paper presents a novel SDR implementation technique which we call Memory Acceleration (MA) that makes extensive use of the memory resources available on a general purpose computing system, in order to accelerate signal computation. MA can provide substantial acceleration factors when applied to conventional SDRs without reducing their peculiar flexibility. As a practical proof of this, an example of MA applied in the real world to the ETSI DVB-T Viterbi decoder is provided. Actually MA is shown able to provide, when applied to such Viterbi decoder, an acceleration factor of 10.4x, with no impact on error correction performances of the decoder and by making no use of any other typical performance enhancement techniques such as low level (Assembler) programming or parallel computation, which though remain compatible with MA. Opportunity for extending the MA approach to the entire radio system, thus implementing what we call a Memory-Based Software Defined Radio (MB-SDR) is finally considered and discussed.
This article discusses the available Software Defined Radios (SDRs), compatible software, message formats, and also shows how it is possible to do penetration tests using SDR for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and ZigBee technologies.
In this paper we present a survey of existing prototypes dedicated to software defined radio. We propose a classification related to the architectural organization of the pro- totypes and provide some conclusions about the most promising architectures. This study should be useful for cognitive radio testbed designers who have to choose between many possible computing platforms. We also introduce a new cognitive radio testbed currently under construction and explain how this study have influenced the test-bed designers choices.
The future 5G wireless infrastructure will support any-to-any connectivity between densely deployed smart objects that form the emerging paradigm known as the Internet of Everything (IoE). Compared to traditional wireless networks that enable communication between devices using a single technology, 5G networks will need to support seamless connectivity between heterogeneous wireless objects and IoE networks. To tackle the complexity and versatility of future IoE networks, 5G will need to guarantee optimal usage of both spectrum and energy resources and further support technology-agnostic conne…
Software-defined Radio (SDR) is a programmable transceiver with the capability of operating various wireless communication protocols without the need to change or update the hardware. Progress in the SDR field has led to the escalation of protocol development and a wide spectrum of applications, with more emphasis on programmability, flexibility, portability, and energy efficiency, in cellular, WiFi, and M2M communication. Consequently, SDR has earned a lot of attention and is of great significance to both academia and industry. SDR designers intend to simplify the realization of communication…
This paper addresses the radio interface problematic for MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork) applications. Here we propose to study the radio reconfigurability in order to provide a unique physical layer which is able to deal with all MANET applications. For implementing this reconfigurable physical layer, we propose to use Impulse Radio Ultra WideBand (IRUWB). This paper presents also our two level design approach for obtaining our reconfigurable IR-UWB receiver on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).
Wireless systems using low-power wireless communication protocol are rapidly gain popularity in the license-free industrial scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands. One such emerging trend in ISM frequency bands is home automation. Historically, all the home devices were once unconnected, today are now being connected either by a wired or wireless connection. The low-power wireless communication protocols enable integration of all the digital home devices into a single system and enhance end user product experience. The rapid prototyping of these end user product using programmable radio…
This paper reports an implementation of the PHY specifications of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for the frequency band 868 915 MHz on a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform. This standard is defined for low power, low data rate and low cost wireless networks. These specifications are used by the Zigbee technology for various applications such as home automation, industry monitoring or medical surveillance. Several hardware PHY 868/915 MHz band IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver implementations have been already reported on ASIC and FPG [1] [2]. SDR offers one possibility to realize a transceiver with hig…
This paper presents the design and implementation of signaling splitting scheme in hyper-cellular network on a software defined radio platform. Hyper-cellular network is a novel architecture of future mobile communication systems in which signaling and data are decoupled at the air interface to mitigate the signaling overhead and allow energy efficient operation of base stations. On an open source software defined radio platform, OpenBTS, we investigate the feasibility of signaling splitting for GSM protocol and implement a novel system which can prove the proposed concept. Standard GSM handse…
Cellular network-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) experience different radio propagation conditions than radio nodes on the ground. Therefore, it has become critical to investigate the performance of aerial radios, both theoretically and through field trials. In this paper, we consider low-altitude aerial nodes that are served by an experimental cellular network. We provide a detailed description of the hardware and software components needed for establishing a broadband wireless testbed for UAV communications research using software radios. Results show that a testbed for innovation …
In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of D2D communication functionality for LTE. To our knowledge, this is the first such implementation that is compliant with the LTE Release 12 standard. In this paper, we design and demonstrate an experiment on mode selection between infrastructure mode and D2D communication mode in LTE networks. We implement our system on a software-defined radio SDR testbed, augmenting the open-source LTE eNodeB and UE implementation provided by the srsLTE software suite. Our measurements demonstrate the cell extension capabilities of D2D and quantify t…
Research conducted in LTE and 5G wireless communications systems uses common off-the-shelf hardware components and commercial software defined radio (SDR) hardware. One of the more popular SDR platforms is the Ettus USRP product line which uses the UHD driver and transport protocol framework. System performance can be increased using kernel bypass frameworks along with UHD. This paper investigates UHD with DPDK in an SDR environment using srslTE as the SDR application. We present measurement results using the iperf3 network performance application that show performance improvements when employ…
Network slicing is a fundamental feature of 5G systems to partition a single network into a number of segregated logical networks, each optimized for a particular type of service, or dedicated to a particular customer or application. The realization of network slicing is particularly challenging in the Radio Access Network (RAN) part, where multiple slices can be multiplexed over the same radio channel and Radio Resource Management (RRM) functions shall be used to split the cell radio resources and achieve the expected behaviour per slice. In this context, this paper describes the key design a…
As new use cases are emerging for unmanned aerial systems (UAS), advanced wireless communications technologies and systems need to be implemented and widely tested. This requires a flexible platform for development, deployment, testing and demonstration of wireless systems with ground and aerial nodes, enabling effective 3D mobile communications and networking. In this paper, we provide a comparative overview of software-defined radios (SDRs), with a specific focus on SDR hardware and software that can be used for aerial wireless experimentation and research. We discuss SDR hardware requiremen…
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) enables correct operation of distributed, i.e., replicated applications in the face of malicious take-over and faulty/buggy individual instances. Recently, BFT designs have gained traction in the context of Software Defined Networking (SDN). In SDN, controller replicas are distributed and their state replicated for high availability purposes. Malicious controller replicas, however, may destabilize the control plane and manipulate the data plane, thus motivating the BFT requirement. Nonetheless, deploying BFT in practice comes at a disadvantage of increased traff…
In this paper, an analysis is carried out for a method to mitigate the path loss through the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) method. The path loss is a major component which determines the QoS of a wireless link. Its effect is complemented by the presence of obstruction between the transmitter and receiver. The future cellular network (5G) focuses on operating with the millimeter-wave (mmW). In higher frequency, path loss can play a significant role in degrading the link quality due to higher attenuation. In a scenario, where the operating environment is changing dynamically, sudden degradation …
The radio access networks (RANs) need to support massive and diverse data traffic with limited spectrum and energy. To cope with this challenge, software-defined radio access network (SDRAN) architectures have been proposed to renovate the RANs. However, current researches lack the design and evaluation of network protocols. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting the protocol design and evaluation of hyper-cellular networks (HyCell), an SDRAN framework making base station (BS) operations globally resource-optimized and energy-efficient (GREEN). Specifically, we first propose a se…
Modern radio astronomy relies on very large amounts of data that need to be transferred between various parts of astronomical instruments, over distances that are often in the range of tens or hundreds of kilometres. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world's largest radio telescope, data rates between its components will exceed Terabits per second. This will impose a huge challenge on its data transport system, especially with regard to power consumption. High-speed data transfers using modern off-the-shelf hardware may impose a significant load on the receiving system with respect …
The article presents a method of organizing men-in-the-middle attack and penetration test on Bluetooth Low Energy devices and ZigBee packets using software define radio with sniffing and spoofing packets, capture and analysis techniques on wireless waves with the focus on Bluetooth. The paper contains the analysis of the latest scientific work in this area, provides a comparative analysis of SDRs and the rationale for the choice of hardware, gives the sequence of actions for collecting wireless data packets and data collection from ZigBee and BLE devices, and analyzes ways to improve captured …
Mobility management is the key feature of cellular networks. When integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into cellular networks, their cell association needs to be carefully managed for coexistence with other cellular users. UAVs move in three dimensions and may traverse several cells on their flight path, and so may be subject to several handovers. In order to enable research on mobility management with UAV users, this paper describes the design, implementation, and testing methodology for handover experiments with aerial users. We leverage software-defined radios (SDRs) and implement a …
5G New Radio (NR) is an emerging radio access technology, which is planned to succeed 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) as global standard of cellular communications in the upcoming years. This paper considers a digital signal processing model and a software implementation of a complete transceiver chain of the Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH) defined by the version 15 of the 3GPP standard, consisting of both baseband transmitter and receiver chains on a physical layer level. The BLER performance of the prototype system implementation under AWGN and Rayleigh fading channel conditions is evalu…
NB-IoT is the 3GPP standard for machine-to-machine communications, recently finalized within LTE release 13. This article gives a brief overview about this new LTE-based radio access technology and presents a implementation developed using the srsLTE software radio suite. We also carry out a performance study in which we compare a theoretical analysis with experimental results obtained in our testbed. Furthermore, we provide some interesting details and share our experience in exploring one of the worldwide first commercial NB-IoT deployments.
A cross-layer scheme, namely ALOHA With Collision Resolution (ALOHA-CR), is proposed for high throughput wireless communications in a cellular scenario. Transmissions occur in a time-slotted ALOHA-type fashion but with an important difference: simultaneous transmissions of two users can be successful. If more than two users transmit in the same slot the collision cannot be resolved and retransmission is required. If only one user transmits, the transmitted packet is recovered with some probability, depending on the state of the channel. If two users transmit the collision is resolved and the p…
Time-sensitive wireless networks are an important enabling building block for many emerging industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Quick prototyping and evaluation of time-sensitive wireless technologies are desirable for R&D efforts. Software-defined radio (SDR), by allowing wireless signal processing on a personal computer (PC), has been widely used for such quick prototyping efforts. Unfortunately, because of the \textit{uncontrollable delay} between the PC and the radio board, SDR is generally deemed not suitable for time-sensitive wireless applications that demand communication…
The Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) offers a revolutionary approach to cellular network deployment, management and evolution. Advances in software-defined radio (SDR) and networking technology, moreover, enable delivering software-defined everything through the Cloud. Resources will be pooled and dynamically allocated leveraging abstraction, virtualization, and consolidation techniques; processes will be automated using common application programming interfaces; and network functions and services will be programmatically provided through an orchestrator. OOCRAN, oocran.dynu.com, is a softwa…
Software defined radio is a widely accepted paradigm for design of reconfigurable modems. The continuing march of Moore's law makes real-time signal processing on general purpose processors feasible for a large set of waveforms. Data rates in the low Mbps can be processed on low-power ARM processors, and much higher data rates can be supported on large x86 processors. The advantages of all-software development (vs. FPGA/DSP/GPU) are compelling: much wider pool of talent, lower development time and cost, and easier maintenance and porting. However, very high-rate systems (above 100 Mbps) are st…
This paper presents our methodology and toolbox that allows analyzing the radio access network security of laboratory and commercial 4G and future 5G cellular networks. We leverage a free open-source software suite that implements the LTE UE and eNB enabling real-time signaling using software radio peripherals. We modify the UE software processing stack to act as an LTE packet collection and examination tool. This is possible because of the openness of the 3GPP specifications. Hence, we are able to receive and decode LTE downlink messages for the purpose of analyzing potential security problem…
