A case study of a MIMO SDR implementation

Funded by a research contract from the Boeing Company, we report on the implementation of a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) software defined radio (SDR) platform forming an operational Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET) node. Our SDR platform utilizes Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) including a motherboard for baseband processing, two daughter boards for RF frontend processing, and an embedded Intel Core General Purpose Processing (GPP) unit hosting Linux operating system. We use GNU Radio to program the PHY and DATA LINK layers of USRP. We also implement the TCP/IP stack on the SDR using the TAP/TUN driver of the Linux Kernel. We are able to run a variety of applications including file transfer, image delivery, stored audio delivery, and live speech. We report the results of our performance benchmarking related to these applications.