Rapid Radio: Analysis-Based Receiver Deployment

Abstract

A large body of work has been produced in the area of productivity enhancers for the design of both Software-Defined Radio and Field Programmable Gate Arrays systems. These tool are created with the goal of aiding the user in the process of instantiating a design. They do not address, however, a specific use-case in which the user does not know or care about what the design of his system is. In this work, analysis-based design is presented and applied to FPGA-based SDRs. The RapidRadio framework abstracts away much of the knowledge required for analyzing an unknown signal and building an FPGA-based receiver. Resource utilization is traded-off for reduced implementation time and increased exibility. Automatic modulation classification is done with blind parameter estimation. Unlike other contemporary work, no a priori knowledge about the signal being classified is assumed. This leads to the development of a system that does not depend on perfect synchronization to classify the signal. A new quasi-generic synchronization architecture that allows the synchronization of multiple modulations schemes is presented. The result of the modulation classification is used to automatically create an FPGA-based radio receiver.