xRadio: An Novel Software Defined Radio (SDR) Platform and Its Exemplar Application to Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Abstract

In this presentation, we introduce a novel software defined radio (SDR) universal wireless platform, xRadio, for fast prototyping of various emerging wireless systems featuring with attracting cost performance ratio when compared to current solutions. xRadio realizes its advancement and integrity based on a compact and right-on-target design strategy, through adopting a cost efficient raspberry PI minicomputer and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip from Altera as its core processors. Function modules can be easily realized through C/C++ and/or python program in a Linux environment or programmable logical elements (LEs) of FPGA achieving powerful computation. To evaluate its performance, an onboard unit (OBU) for vehicle-to-vehicle communications based on both long term evolution (LTE) and dedicate short range communications (DSRC) systems is being built up. Corresponding systems design and key performances are tested and validated including bit error rate (BER) to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and processing latency, which validates the usability of xRadio. The unprecedented price-to-performance ratio of xRadio has potential to be applied in a broad range of applications ranging from engineering, production and educations.