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Open source software-defined radio tools for education, research, and rapid prototyping

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Abstract

Software-defined radios (SDR) offer several advantages over traditional, hardware-based radios, most notably flexibility and reconfigurability. Developing SDR applications can be a difficult process, however, for several reasons. First, much of the work involved deals with standards compliance, rather than radio functionality. This portion of the work is very detailed and error prone, leading to wasted time and effort. Second, there is little to no support available for the debugging and refinement portions of the development cycle. There is no easy way to monitor or control SDR applications at runtime. The Waveform Workshop was created to address these issues. A part of the OSSIE SDR project, the Waveform Workshop drastically reduces the time and effort involved in SDR development. It automatically generates the portions of the software related to standards compliance, letting developers concentrate on radio functionality. In addition, the Waveform Workshop provides tools for both monitoring and controlling SDR applications at runtime, making debugging much easier.

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Correspondence to Jason Snyder.

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Snyder, J., Seeralan, D., Sayed, S. et al. Open source software-defined radio tools for education, research, and rapid prototyping. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 16, 67–80 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-012-0241-2

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