Open-source implementation of an ad-hoc IEEE802.11a/g/p software-defined radio on low-power and low-cost general purpose processors

Abstract

This work proposes a low-cost and low-power software-defined radio open-source platform with IEEE 802.11 a/g/p wireless communication capability. A state-of-the-art version of the IEEE 802.11 a/g/p software for GNU Radio (a free and open-source software development framework) is available online, but we show here that its computational complexity prevents operations in low-power general purpose processors, even at throughputs below the standard. We therefore propose an evolution of this software that achieves a faster and lighter IEEE 802.11 a/g/p transmitter and receiver, suitable for low-power general purpose processors, for which GNU Radio provides very limited support; we discuss and describe the software radio processing structuring that is necessary to achieve the goal, providing a review of signal processing techniques. In particular, we emphasize the advanced reduced-instruction set (RISC) machine (ARM) study case, for which we also optimize some of the processing libraries. The presented software will remain open-source.