The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) Family of Low‐Cost SDRs

With the incredible growth of devices that use the RF spectrum, the pressure to fit more users into the finite spectrum has pushed ever more efficient technologies to the fore. This growth is expected to continue at a pace faster than spectral efficiency measures are projected to grow. Despite this growth, there are still underutilized pieces of spectrum, but these pieces are often disjointed and geographically or temporally variable. At the same time, spectrum allocation is a slow and expensive process, so any technology that can lend flexibility to this process is of great value. One piece of the puzzle may be opportunistic spectrum access (OSA), the subject of this book. A key enabling technology for OSA is software defined radio (SDR). SDR can allow one general-purpose hardware device to be used for many different types of communication systems simply by changing out the software, which implements the specific modulation, coding, and protocols. This is distinguished from previous radio systemswhere these functionswere normally conducted by fixed-function