Rapid Implementation and Demonstration of Radio Applications Using WISCANet

Abstract

Implementing new RF applications has traditionally required significant time and expertise, even for relatively simple algorithms. Software-defined radios (SDRs) have recently enabled rapid implementation and validation of RF applications without specialized hardware or advanced programming skills. We further facilitate this rapid application development by constructing WISCANet – a diverse network of commercial SDRs with specialized control software. WISCANet automatically configures these SDRs and controls transmit and receive events with minimal user input. This allows users to rapidly implement over-the-air RF applications by simply defining the baseband processing chain in software. Furthermore, WISCANet emulates real-time operations, which allows users to test real-time applications without the usual complications such as processing speed or hardware limitations. In this paper, we present recent improvements to the WISCA Software-Defined Radio Network (SDR-N). These improvements include configurable and flexible multi-channel phase coherence and support for both MATLAB and Python applications. The open source release of this software may be found on GitHub at: https://github.com/WISCA