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Army Lab Builds Test Bed for Future SDRs (2/5/10)
By Michelle Zilis
U.S. Army engineers are building a test bed for cognitive radio next-generation technologies. Working toward the goal of an intelligent radio, the lab wants to see if it’s possible to create “a radio with no knobs that literally [soldiers] can turn on and it works,” said Tim Leising, team lead for the Army’s Software Defined Radio (SDR) Lab.
Officials at the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center’s (CERDEC) SDR Lab in collaboration with their Navy counterparts are working on discovering technology for the next-generation SDR. They hope to enhance software to allow a radio to find its own spectrum and use it, Leising said. The first step is creating the test bed and researching software. “We’re really trying to see if there is any value in building a completely intelligent radio.”
The test bed will function as a platform to test future cognitive technology components, ranging from algorithms to spectrum sensor components to pieces of hardware, such as smart antennas, he said.
“This way we can see how the components all work together on one platform. A lot of research is on one component, but we want to test them together,” he said.
Working with the Navy Research Lab, the SDR Lab plans to transfer previous development done on the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) to the GNU radio’s open source, free software environment. Researching JTRS software was limiting in part because of cost restrictions, Leising said.
GNU radios, in addition to costing less, are more accessible because many universities use them and all processing happens on the PC side. The lab hopes “to open the gates of cognitive radio development to academia, industry and other Department of Defense (DoD) organizations by building a universal test bed,” an official said.
The technology switch will allow engineers to build bigger networks with more nodes. The group is currently building a testing platform with 64 nodes. Once it is completed, the lab will work to make the test bed remote accessible using the Defense Research Engineering Network to house the software program, allowing DoD organizations and external research partners to test their software on it from any location.
The SDR Lab aims to have initial capabilities by September, Leising said. The group already possesses all the hardware, and software developments will be done in-house.
With this new technology, possible avenues of use are abundant, but Leising said that first researchers need to prove the concept. The lab hasn’t addressed public safety communications, but Leising said, “Off the top of my head, there’s no reason why it couldn’t work.”
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