Open-source implementation of an ad-hoc IEEE802.11a/g/p software-defined radio on low-power and low-cost general purpose processors

This work proposes a low-cost and low-power software-defined radio open-source platform with IEEE 802.11 a/g/p wireless communication capability. A state-of-the-art version of the IEEE 802.11 a/g/p software for GNU Radio (a free and open-source software development framework) is available online, but we show here that its computational complexity prevents operations in low-power general purpose processors, even at throughputs below the standard. We therefore propose an evolution of this software that achieves a faster and lighter IEEE 802.11 a/g/p transmitter and receiver, suitable for low-power general purpose processors, for which GNU Radio provides very limited support; we discuss and describe the software radio processing structuring that is necessary to achieve the goal, providing a review of signal processing techniques. In particular, we emphasize the advanced reduced instruction set (RISC) machine (ARM) study case, for which we also optimize some of the processing libraries. The presented software will remain open-source.