Evaluation of GNU Radio Platform Enhanced for Hardware Accelerated Radio Design

Abstract

The advent of software radio technology has enabled radio developers to design and imple- ment radios with great ease and flexibility. Software radios are effective in experimentation and development of radio designs. However, they have limitations when it comes to high- speed, high-throughput designs. This limitation can be overcome by introducing a hardware element to the software radio platform. Enhancing GNU Radio for Hardware Accelerated Radio Design project implements such a scheme by augmenting an FPGA co-processor to a conventional GNU Radio flow. In this thesis, this novel platform is evaluated in terms of performance of a radio design, as well as hardware and software system requirements. A simple and efficient Zigbee receiver design is presented. Implementation of this receiver is used as a proof-of-concept for the effectiveness and design methodology of the modified GNU Radio. This work also proposes a scheme to extend this idea for design of ultra-wideband radio systems based on multiband-OFDM.