Open Source Software-Defined Radio: A survey on GNUradio and its applications

This report analyzes the feasibility of using a Software Defined Radio solution for research purposes. We focused on the open source GNUradio project and studied its suitability for reproducing and analyzing some widespread wireless protocols, such as IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.4, and GSM. We found that the use of GNUradio with the Universal Software Radio Peripheral can help researchers in avoiding the closed source firmwares/drivers of commercial chipsets by providing a full customizability at physical and datalink layers. On the other hand, software radios are not always capable of correctly reproducing operations previously done in the hardware domain. This leads to several limitations with widespread standards. In this report we try to provide a picture of such limitations and the current status of the GNUradio framework. This work has been supported by the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.) project N0. Ftw is supported by the Austrian Government and by the City of Vienna within the competence center program COMET. This work would not have been possible without the precious information contained in the official GNUradio mailing list archive. A special thanks goes to all the active participants.