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7th International Information and Telecommunication Technologies Symposium (I2TS’2008).

December 03-05, 2008 - Iguaçu Falls - Paraná. Brazil.

An Experimental Setup for Research in Cognitive


Radio and Teaching Digital Transmission
Igor Almeida, Luciana Rêgo, Marcel Cabral, Lilian Freitas and Aldebaro Klautau
Signal Processing Laboratory (LaPS), Federal University of Para (UFPA), Brazil - www.laps.ufpa.br
Emails: {igoralmeida, luciana, marcelsc, liliancf, aldebaro}@ufpa.br

Abstract—Digital transmission techniques have rapidly evolved (file header) and passes the remaining bytes to an “unpacker”.
over the last years. Current wireless systems are very sophisti- The GMSK modulator then sends complex symbols to the
cated and educational institutions face the challenge of setting USRP, which converts them into a modulated signal. The
up realistic experimental setups for laboratory experiments and
research. This work describes a setup for teaching techniques inverse process takes place at the receiver. The extra Packed
such as multicarrier modulation and supporting research in to Unpacked block is necessary due to the format adopted by
cognitive radio. The hardware is composed by the USRP board the demodulator. One needs to append the stripped header for
and peripherals, while the software is based on the GNU Radio visual comparisons of the files as figures.
open source project. This low cost combination allows several
experiments of interest. A system using the GMSK modulation
is described to illustrate the implemented setup.

I. I NTRODUCTION
The motivation of this work is the development of a low-cost
setup and associated software for two kinds of experiments:
digital transmission lessons and research in cognitive radio.
The importance of realistic laboratory setups for undergraduate
and graduate classes is unquestionable. Research in cognitive
radio (CR) [1] is also important because it aims the efficient
use of the scarce spectrum. Setups built with a similar moti-
vation have been discussed in, e.g., [2].
The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to generate
and freely distribute on the Web documentation such that
groups in other institutions can reproduce the setup and
experiments. The second aspect is to contribute with spectrum
sensing software to the open source community, in the context
of the GNU Radio project [2]. Fig. 1. Block diagram describing the implemented wireless system using
GMSK. The blocks correspond to objects in Python that interface with GNU
II. I MPLEMENTED S ETUP Radio code in C++ language.
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is a
hardware device that targets the GNU Radio project. All the
III. C ONCLUSIONS
USRP design is open source, including schematics and layouts,
for example. It has two pairs of receiver and transmitter slots. This work describes an on-going effort for generating and
These slots provide two digital to analog converters and two freely distributing documentation to allow other groups repro-
analog to digital converters, with sampling rates of 128 MS/s duce the setup and the proposed experiments with GNU Radio
and 64 MS/s, respectively. A FPGA chip is programmed to and USRP. This setup allowed, for example, experiments with
provide digital up-converters and digital down-converters. modulation classifiers, which aim at identifying the kind of
An experiment is described here to illustrate the imple- modulation (FSK, PSK, etc.) used in a given spectrum range.
mented setup. Two USRP mother boards were used, each one R EFERENCES
connected to a FLEX 2400 daughter board. The goal is to
[1] I. Akyildiz, W. Lee, M. C. Vuran, and S. Mohanty, “Next genera-
transmit a given file (for example, a figure in the BMP format) tion/dynamic spectrum access/cognitive radio wireless networks: A sur-
using the GMSK modulation with a carrier frequency of 2.5 vey,” Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and
GHz. The second USRP receives the signal, demodulates, Telecommunications Networking, vol. 50, pp. 2127 – 2159, Sep. 2006.
[2] Z. Yan, Z. Ma, H. Cao, G. Li, and W. Wang, “Spectrum sensing, access
writes to disk and compares with the original file. The data and coexistence testbed for cognitive radio using USRP,” in 4th IEEE
flow graph depicted in Figure 1 lists the processing blocks, as International Conference on Circuits and Systems for Communications
well as their corresponding output. The first transmitter block (ICCSC), 2008, pp. 270 – 274.
reads the file, while its successor block ignores the first bytes

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