Remote implementation of GNU radio-based SDR development environment

Software-defined radio (SDR) is used in several areas, such as the verification and implementation of radio prototypes. The SDR environment is generally configured with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a personal computer (PC). However, since ADCs and PCs are fixed configurations, reconfigurations are needed in order to respond to different data sources and computing environments when the radio protocol or SDR are indefinite. To enable this reconfiguration, we present a cloud platform that has scalable computing resources and data sources deployed in a wide area, using an existing SDR development environment. In order to apply the existing SDR development environment to the cloud platform, UI separation and data management are required. In this manuscript, we implement an SDR environment for many unspecified users through UI separation by selecting the GNU Radio Companion (GRC) as the platform. We focused on compatibility and flexibility with regard to the configuration, in order to allow the user to adjust the resources consumed by the PC. The results show that one particular implementation of the remote SDR execution and development is suitable. In addition, we confirmed the compatibility with GRC in terms of user skills and software assets, and achieved distributed processing to allocate resources between the client and cloud according to the user's discretion, by dividing the processing of the SDR on the basis of the function unit.