A Container-based Architecture to Provide Services from SDR Devices

The growing use of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) in computational environments has brought flexibility to the development of applications compared to traditional radio implementation. However, with the hardware-to-software trend, the diversity of current technologies, such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV), cloud computing, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and emerging Industry 4.0 impose an integration challenge to the SDR. This work presents a method of integrating SDR into network environments through full application containerization. A container-based architecture is proposed, with a possible topology for container storage and management. The architecture was applied to generate two SDR-based applications, a real-time flight tracker web page and a LoRa-based text transfer application. In addition, the appliance of different types of COTS SDRs, USRP 2932, RTL-SDR, and LimeSDR, with the architecture was demonstrated. The results show that the architecture imposes a maximum overhead of 5.1% of CPU utilization and 8.38 s for service startup time, compared to a traditional non-virtualized SDR implementation. The architecture also brings non-functional benefits such as ease of service management, replicability, network isolation options, and a set of features inherited from container virtualization.