RF-SITL: A Software-in-the-loop Channel Emulator for UAV Swarm Networks

We introduce RF-SITL, a radio frequency (RF) software-in-the-loop (SITL) channel emulator developed with GNU Radio and the University at Buffalo’s Airborne Networking and Communications (UB-ANC) emulator to enable integrated simulation of systems comprising multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) interacting over a wireless communication channel. RF-SITL could be paired with any multi-robot simulator to enable I/Q sample-level fidelity simulation of communication interactions between the robots by accurately simulating channel effects, including interference, noise, distance-dependent path loss, and packet losses. RF-SITL works as follows: 1) it instantiates a virtual software-defined transceiver in GNU Radio for each UAV simulated in the UB-ANC Emulator; 2) it builds an interference channel model in which each network node receives the superposition of signals transmitted from other nodes; and 3) it synchronizes the location of each simulated UAV in the UB-ANC Emulator with the virtualized RF transceivers in RF-SITL, such that the communication channel between nodes can accurately model distance-dependent channel effects, such as path loss. With these capabilities, we can use both off-the-shelf and custom-built signal processing flowgraphs that simulate Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK), 802.11-like Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and direct sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) links in GNU Radio to simulate swarm UAV networks prior to their deployment in software-defined radios in a swarm UAV network.