Software radio implementation of short-range wireless standards for sensor networking

Software Defined Radios can provide significant benefits as backend gateways or base stations for sensor networks, which do not face the stringent resource constraints of innetwork nodes. We extended GNU Radio with two physical layer implementations of IEEE 802.15.4 and an FSK modulation, and use the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to interoperate with the Chipcon CC1000 and CC2420 radios found on the popular Mica2, MicaZ and Telos B motes. The wideband nature of the USRP makes it feasible for a single SDR base station to simultaneously communicate on multiple independent channels, and provide network bridging across incompatible radio standards. The demo will show a software defined radio base station talking simultaniously to Mica2 and MicaZ nodes and will relay messages coming from the Mica2 to the MicaZ, and vice versa. Additionally, we will present a unified design and modeling environment for Software Defined Radio systems, which aims to bridge the diverse set of design abstractions and software tools used by engineers specializing in communication, networking, and embedded systems. Our environment extends Berkeley’s Ptolemy II, a heterogeneous modeling and simulation environment, which provides an overall framework and graphical interface. We provide a Ptolemy interface to GNU Radio for physical layer design, and the Click modular router from MIT, for network level design. This approach allows designers to work at their preferred design abstraction, while permitting integrated system modeling, access to rich libraries of existing system components, and efficient code generation for implementation on real targets.