A high-performance and high-programmability reconfigurable wireless development platform

Abstract

The ongoing mobile Internet revolution calls for quick adoptions of new wireless communication and networking technologies. To enable such fast innovations, a software-defined platform is needed to validate and refine new algorithms, protocols, and architectures in communications and networking. Unfortunately, no current systems can meet both requirements of high programmability and high performance. In this work, we report our recent effort on building such a reconfigurable platform. We show that our proposed platform, GRT, can support both high-performance and high-programmability in a unified framework. Moreover, GRT is seamlessly integrated into the standard TCP/IP network protocol stack under Linux, and can act as a WiFi-capable, network interface card. Furthermore, it ensures backward compatibility with the popular GNU Radio platform, a user-friendly, yet low-performance system. In the demo, we will demonstrate the full functionalities of the 802.11a/g WiFi on GRT, including (1) wireless file transfer between two GRT systems at the speed of tens of Mbps; (2) execution of default Linux TCP/IP applications without changes (e.g. SSH); (3) access point (AP) operation mode, where commodity WiFi devices access the Internet via the GRT-converted AP over the WiFi channel.