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SparSDR++: Wideband Monitoring and Discovery of Communication

Supervisors

Suitable for

MSc in Advanced Computer Science
Mathematics and Computer Science, Part C
Computer Science, Part C
Computer Science, Part B
Computer Science and Philosophy, Part C

Abstract

The goal of this project is to extend the "SparSDR" toolset to make it more useful for passive wideband monitoring and discovery of communication.

Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have been used extensively in recent years to monitor radio communication. These devices can tune a wide range of frequencies (typically up to 6GHz) and can reach even wider frequencies with appropriate up/down-converters. However, their bandwidth is often limited by both the sample rate of the chip and the USB/ethernet link back to the main PC.

The SparSDR project aims to fix the latter of these problems, by using the onboard FPGA provided by some SDRs to perform onboard power triggering. This enables the SDR to monitor a wide bandwidth on a limitedrate backhaul, by only sending back the samples containing potentially meaningful data.

This project will involve work with the following technologies:

  • SDRs, GNURadio
  • FPGA development (Xilinx, Vivado)
  •  High performance C++

Prerequisites Students taking on the project should be experienced with some of these
areas, and able/willing to learn the others.

References - SparSDR paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3307334.3326088
- SparSDR source code: https://github.com/ucsdsysnet/sparsdr
- GNU Radio: https://www.gnuradio.org/