Software Platform for the Comprehensive Testing of Transmission Protocols Developed in GNU Radio

• Published in: Information (Basel) Vol. 15; no. 1; p. 62
• Main Authors: Stef, Mihai Petru, Polgar, Zsolt Alfred
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-01-2024
• Subjects: Access control; Algorithms; Automation; communication protocols; Computer software industry; Critical components; Digital signal processors; Field programmable gate arrays; GNU radio; Monitoring; monitoring messaging; networking environment; Signal processing; Software development; Software quality; Software radio; software testing; software-defined radio; Test stands; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 2078-2489; 2078-2489
• DOI: 10.3390/info15010062

With the constant growth of software-defined radio (SDR) technologies in fields related to wireless communications, the need for efficient ways of testing and evaluating the physical-layer (PHY) protocols developed for these technologies in real-life traffic scenarios has become more critical. This paper proposes a software testbed that enhances the creation of network environments that allow GNU radio applications to be fed with test traffic in a simple way and through an interoperable interface. This makes the use of any traffic generator possible—existing ones or one that is custom-built—to evaluate a GNU radio application. In addition, this paper proposes an efficient way to collect PHY-specific monitoring data to improve the performance of the critical components of the message delivery path by employing the protocol buffers library. This study considers the entire testing and evaluation ecosystem and demonstrates how PHY-specific monitoring information is collected, handled, stored, and processed as time series to allow complex visualization and real-time monitoring.