SDR: Getting Started
Software Defined Radio (SDR) offers a solution to facilitate interoperability on a device level. It combines the prospect of reconfigurability and adaptability within a single radio system; enabling it to take up different ‘personalities’ or ‘waveforms’ depending on the software module being used. The ability of such a system to easily vary its parameters, to suit a wide range of applications, could lead to new opportunities and uses when applied to the Internet of Things (IoT). The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) encompasses such a broad array of applications that often a single design would require more than one wireless interface, which adds to the space, power, and cost of an implementation. As a consequence, a Software Defined Radio is ideally suited to providing the flexibility needed to support such a large range of constantly evolving devices and standards. The essence of the Software Defined Radio (SDR) is that it has a generic hardware platform on which a number of software ‘personalities’ can be switched to provide different functionality for specific tasks. These ‘personalities’ incorporate settings and functions such as modulation and demodulation schemes, filtering, bandwidth options, frequency selection and frequency hopping algorithms. Thus, by reconfiguring and changing the software, the performance of the radio can be altered. The object is therefore to provide an SDR design that can be adapted to solve the IoT dilemma of incorporating multiple RF technologies on the same device or network infrastructure. Such a concept would ultimately simplify designs, shorten development cycles, and reduce overall cost at the same time as providing better interconnectedness. In order to explore possible applications of SDR for IoT, multiple platforms were reviewed. These were either receive-only platforms or transceiver development platforms. In the end, to ensure flexibility and good processing capability in the exploration phase, an Avnet PicoZed SDR development kit was purchased. The software could be implemented on this hardware, firstly using GNU Radio and then gradually replacing its modules with equivalent ones using proprietary algorithms designed for the FPGA. This documentation is intended to be used in conjunction with the Inter-IoT code repository.