Packetized-OFDM Radio Transport Protocols Over GNU-Radio Architecture

The components of radio communication systems used to be implemented in hardware. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is instead changing radio communications by applying software in microprocessors or embedded systems. SDR is making the capabilities of digital electronics more practical, enabling rapid conversion of theory to designed systems.

On the major categories of communication protocols, the importance of SDR technology is orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). The OFDM protocol encodes digital data on multiple carrier frequencies. It is widely used in digital communication applications, such as Wireless Local Area Network (802.11 WLAN), 4G (3GPP-LTE) mobile communications, and Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standards. In this thesis, we utilize a hardware platform for software radio known as the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and integrate an open source software radio standard (GNU-Radio). A GNU-Radio software development toolkit was used to develop a packet-based OFDM SDR for voice and data transmission. In addition, the VME bus International Trade Association (VITA-49 Protocol) standard is proposed as the Radio Transport (VRT) standard defining a transport-layer interface to promote interoperability between radio frequency (RF) receivers and signal processing equipment, as well as physical layer (PHY) and medium access control (MAC).