SDR-WInnComm Europe 2013 Papers and Presentations
11-13 June 2013
Munich, Germany

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Presentation Abstracts:

ALOE Framework and Waveform Design Workshop
Ismael Gomez (Polytechnical University of Catalonia & UPC, Spain); Antoni Gelonch (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain); Vuk Marojevic (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain)
Wireless communications technology is mostly proprietary despite that we are using it every day. ALOE is an open-source framework for building non-military software radios. ALOE simplifies the process of creating new communications systems using common of-the-shelf (COTS) hardware as well as real equipment. ALOE allows people to innovative and come up with better transmitter and receiver solutions, having a significant and immediate impact on society. It is being developed under the FlexNets initiative (http://flexnets.upc.edu/trac/) promoting collaborative research and development (R&D) and the Open-Source LTE Deployment (OSLD) project (https://sites.google.com/site/osldproject/home). The mission of OSLD is promoting open-source radios and involving more people in developing software radios. The project encourages model-based waveform design. This  will present the most salient features of the SDR framework ALOE and the waveform development tools. We will present these using the outcomes of the OSLD project. The tutorial will show the development cycle of ALOE waveforms from scratch: First, a model is generated using Matlab or Octave and its performance and functionality is validated. The model is divided into separate functions that correspond to the DSP blocks and together form the processing chain. The second step is the implementation of each of these DSP blocks in C using the ALOE development template. The ALOE build system automatically generates three components: an executable file for debugging the C code (standalone mode), a Matlab MEX-file for signal verification using Matlab/Octave tools or our model, and a shared library for ALOE (ALOE component). The third step then involves substituting the Matlab functions one-by-one with the corresponding MEX files for validating the correct implementation. The fourth and last step consists on creating the waveform description file that interfaces and parametrizes the ALOE components of the waveform. The waveform is then ready to be executed on the target processing platform. We will demonstrate the real-time execution of our LTE uplink and downlink physical layer implementation on a multiprocessing execution environment using USRPs for the radio link. We will also show ALOE's runtime reconfiguration capabilities for dynamically changing from one LTE mode to another and explain and demonstrate how we control the processing throughput and latency.
Session 1 - Wireless Networks
PHYSEC Concepts for Wireless Public Networks - Introduction, State of the Art and Perspectives
Jean-Claude Belfiore (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, France); François Delaveau (Thales Communications & France, France); Eric Garrido (Thales Communications and Security, France); Cong Ling (Imperial College London, United Kingdom); Alain Sibille (Telecom Paris Tech & ENSTA PARISTECH, France)
This presentation aims at providing elements about advances in physical security and about relevant application perspectives in public wireless networks. This work is supported by the PHYLAWS project (FP7 id. 317562, starting Nov. 2012). Given the growing prevalence of wireless radio-communication technologies, the security and the reliability a person or an organization can have in the confidentiality of the exchanged information is a major societal challenge for both personal and professional sphere. Moreover, the growing importance of sensing procedures and of cognitive pilot channels in future radio access technologies (white spectrum, cognitive networks), will occur numerous radio-transmissions of geo-referenced spectrum allocations and of radio engineering data, whose integrity and confidentiality are major industrial challenges for both operators and administrations. Security of radio-interface within wireless networks appears now as crucial for many applications such as broadband internet, e-commerce, radio-terminal payments, bank services, machine to machine, health/hospital distant services. Most of citizens, professionals, stakeholders, services providers and economical actors are thus concerned by confidentiality lacks and by privacy improvements of the physical layer of wireless networks. On the first hand, several classical solutions already exist for protecting privacy of radio communication, - At access attempts: dedicated early identification protocols exist such as Identification of Friend and Foe. - At the transmission level, wave forms can be designed in order to achieve Low Probability of Interception (LPI) and Low Probability of Detection (LPD), by using furtive spread spectrum signals or frequency/time hopped signals. Such transec protections apply mainly at signal frame and at symbol level. - At the signaling level, protocols can be designed in order to achieve low probability of decoding and low intrusion capabilities of the signaling messages by non-legitimate users, thanks to subscriber authentication procedure, to advanced scrambling interleaving coding and ciphering techniques etc. Such netsec protections may apply either at signal frame, at symbol level and at bit level. - At the communication level, encryption algorithm such as DES, AES, Self-Synchronizing stream cipher, etc., and message integrity control schemes are used in order to avoid non legitimate interpretation and/or access attempts of the users' messages. Such comsec protections apply mainly at message/bit level. Nevertheless, all these classical protections require a priori knowledge or exchanges of keys, thus improving the complexity of the network management and/or reducing the set of users of highest protected modes. In addition, these protections often require shared time reference. Moreover, their implantation use added data, and thus decrease the spectrum efficiency especially when facing short packet transmission mode. Finally these constraints trend to dramatically reduce the effective privacy of wireless standards when designed for a worldwide mass market. One the second hand, Physical Layer Security is a radically novel concept that exploit the properties of the local radio-environments, especially when complex, dispersive and non-stationary. • The fundamental model of wiretap channel has led to the definition of secrecy capacity and to the design and/or to the re-use of advanced coding schemes in order to improve it (such as Low Density Parity Check Codes, lattice codes, trellis coded modulations, coset codes, polar codes). • A native tremendous advantage of Physec is the absence of Keys: Security over radio-channel is achieved in the same processing as signal transmission, thanks to coding schemes that optimize information recovery by legitimate receiver and mitigate information about the legitimate link at any eavesdropper location. Thus, no external information is required nor exchanged and low rate penalty is expected of communication content. • Because of its information-theoretic foundation, physec is intrinsically robust to any computer attack (unlimited computing power), even to quantum attack. • For the close future of wireless standards, physec appears as a "front end" solution for warranting privacy, that provides confidentiality at the radio interface by software means only, with low impacts at upper layers of the transmission protocol and at network management. Thus, many practical advantages may be expected from Physec-derivate solutions: reduced impact on terminal and network architectures, easy and low cost integration, compatibility with existing encryption solutions and radio access technologies, negligible impact on spectrum efficiency, etc. This paper will first introduce several notions relevant to information theory and the main principle that are relevant to Physical Layer Security. Then, from a state of the current researches, we will highlight theoretic advantages and point out several security solutions that are outputs of the native Physec concepts when facing passive eavesdroppers, such as advanced secrecy coding schemes, cooperative jamming and implantations within MIMO RATs. We will then introduce physec perspectives to counter active threats such as radio-hacker intrusion attempts of signaling messages. Possible drawbacks of physec will be discussed too, that may be relevant to secrecy codes determination, to implantation of coding and decoding schemes into handset and base stations, to embedded computing complexity (versus the expected performances of embedded computers), etc. The paper will conclude on practical implantation perspectives of Physec in existing and future radio-networks, as stand-alone added modules operating at the physical player, or as added algorithm combined with classical solutions in order to upgrade and/or to simplify existing transec, netsec and comsec protections. It will highlight particular items been studied and developed in the PHYLAWS project that intent to merge both academic and industrial skills in order to provide enhanced-secure RATs into existing and future public wireless standards.
Active and Passive Eavesdropper Threats Within Public and Private Civilian Wireless-Networks - Existing and Potential Future Countermeasures - A Brief Overview
François Delaveau (Thales Communications & France, France); Antti Evesti (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland); Jani Suomalainen (VTT, Finland); Nir Shapira (Celeno Communications Ltd, France)
This presentation aims at providing elements about threats that may drop privacy and thrust in public wireless networks, because of eavesdropper and hacking technologies that operate at the radio interface, and aims at providing elements about relevant counter-measures. This work is supported by the PHYLAWS project (FP7 id. 317562, starting Nov. 2012). Given the growing prevalence of wireless radio-communication technologies, the security and the reliability a person or an organization can have in the confidentiality of the exchanged information is a major societal challenge for both personal and professional sphere. Moreover, the growing importance of sensing procedures and of cognitive pilot channels in future radio access technologies (white spectrum, cognitive networks), will occur numerous radio-transmissions of geo-referenced spectrum allocations and of radio engineering data, whose integrity and confidentiality are major industrial challenges for both operators and administrations. Security of radio-interface within wireless networks appears now as crucial for many applications such as broadband internet, e-commerce, radio-terminal payments, bank services, machine to machine, health/hospital distant services. Most of citizens, professionals, stakeholders, services providers and economical actors are thus concerned by confidentiality lacks and by privacy improvements of the physical layer of wireless networks. This paper will first describes the main kind of security protocols that are used at the physical layer of wireless civilian networks, such as subscriber authentication, control of message integrity, cyphering procedures of messages' content, etc. By focusing on several example such as radio-cells (GSM, UMTS, LTE), Wireless Access Network (WiFi), Short Range Communications (Bluetooth, ZigBee), etc., we will introduce the main failures that may occur in these procedures and discuss about their multiple causes: first of all the worldwide nature of modern digital standards and the consequent intrinsic weakness of the early negotiation phases; often the radio access technology itself; sometimes operators' radio-engineering practices, users' misunderstanding of security aspects, policies restrictions that may occur locally, etc. By considering these weaknesses, we will describe several hacker and eavesdropper threat during the initial access attempts, during negotiation protocols and during established calls. We will take into account both active and passive attacks. Nevertheless, in order to avoid any paranoiac or angelic caricature, we will consider too the (severe) practical limitations of eavesdropper and hacking systems that are caused by radio environment in many real field situation. Then, existing countermeasures principles for improving thrust and security within wireless network will be introduced, by distinguishing security of radio-signal (transmission security), security of signaling message content (network security), security of users' message content (communication security). Advantages and drawbacks of these procedures regarding civilian use will be discussed. Additional considerations on secure architectures for radio terminals will be given too. Finally, we will introduce new protection concepts for radio-communications that exploit the physical properties of radio-environments. Especially when complex, dispersive and non-stationary, radio-environment and radio propagation has to be measured by infrastructures and handsets (equalization, RAKE processing, MISO/MIMO transmitters and receivers, sensing procedures of cognitive radios, etc.) and the relevant physical information provide significant opportunities for enhancing security algorithms during access phases and established calls: • Implantation of coding schemes that optimize the secrecy capacity over a legitimate radio link, (and that mitigate the information about the legitimate link at any eavesdropper locations) • Use of propagation-dependent random generator sources for generation of secret keys, combination with existing coding/cyphering schemes • Implantation of versatile and of artificial random in radio access schemes at several levels: allocation of spectrum resource, modulation, coding, ciphering. • Design of radio access schemes that generate signal mixtures: duplex techniques, MIMO, MISO, artificial jamming. • Design of early identification procedures based on weak/furtive transmission signals. • Etc. All these concepts deal with "physical based" security in a large sense (Physec). The paper will conclude on the most promising Physec technologies that are expected in the future years by mixing classical protections and advanced issues of information-theoretic security, secrecy coding and cooperative jamming. It will highlight particular items been studied and developed in the PHYLAWS project that intent to merge both academic and industrial skills in order to provide enhanced secure RATs with realistic implantation perspectives in existing and future wireless standards.
Resources Brokering between Neighbouring Cells Mechanism for Cell-Edge Capacity Enhancements of a Broadband LTE based Public Safety Network - Presentation Only
Jean-Christophe Schiel (CASSIDIAN & An EADS Company, France); François Montaigne (EADS DS, France); Guy Philippe (EADS DS, France)
 
Software-Defined Radio: A Good Start but Is It Enough? - Presentation Only
Manuel Uhm (Coherent Logix, United States)

Software defined radio (SDR) has become the dominant technology for radios deployed for military communications, satellite communications, public safety communications, commercial wireless infrastructure and even mobile handsets. This has come about for many reasons, including the need for multi-mode support, the flexibility to adapt to ever evolving air interface protocols even after deployment, and the development cost savings and time-to-market benefit from software code reuse. So, given this impressive level of success, surely SDR is a means to an end. Or is it the beginning of a much larger trend? In fact, SDR was just the beginning for SDS, or software defined systems. Increasingly, systems like handsets and even mobile infrastructure need to be much more than a radio. Handsets need the computational performance to not only do multimode radios, but also tasks such as video coding, computational imaging, graphics acceleration, analytics, etc. For infrastructure with a longer lifetime, future-proofing is an important characteristic, but in addition, there is value in putting data content from the cloud right at the edge by the radio access network to reduce latency and improve the user experience, which necessitates storage and video processing, as well as radio processing. In order to make SDS a reality, however, a new architecture is required to support a processing paradigm that extends beyond multi-mode to multi-application, such as radios, cameras, gaming, etc. Therefore, this architecture has to have the performance to support computationally intensive standards such as LTE-Advanced or H.265, as well as tasks that may not even be fully known at deployment, at very low power. Architectural options for software defined systems will be explored.
Session 2 - Civil Communications (EDGE, WiMAX, LTE)
An Efficient Incremental Redundancy Implementation for 2.75G Evolved EDGE
Benjamin Weber (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Harald Kröll (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Christian Benkeser (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Qiuting Huang (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
The latest 2.75G enhancements in the GSM standard, also referred to as Evolved EDGE comprise higher order modulation schemes and turbo coding. Type II hybrid ARQ or Incremental Redundancy (IR) mechanism aids Evolved EDGE systems to achieve higher average throughput. A Base Transceiver Station (BTS) transmits punctured Radio Link Control (RLC) blocks packed on bursts to a Mobile Station (MS). In the MS, a RLC block, typically represented as soft information, is stored in case decoding proves unsuccessful. Subsequently, the BTS retransmits the RLC block with a different puncturing pattern and the MS combines the soft information of the current transmission and the previously stored version. In case decoding fails again, the procedure is repeated. Correspondingly, the coding rate decreases with each retransmission whereas the decoding success rate increases. Thus, IR aids to achieve high average throughput. However, the MS is requested to accept up to 1024 RLC blocks. Minimum average throughput requirements from the 3GPP specifications ask that a large number of these blocks are stored in the memory of the MS. Therefore, memory and processor challenges are two major concerns when implementing IR at MS side. [1,2] A classical hardware setup of the MS consists of a SoC for the digital part of the protocol stack attached to an RF transceiver. The SoC has I/O ports for external RAM, display, microphone, and other peripherals. Internally, the SoC system comprises a system processor for L2/L3 operations. For L1 or digital baseband processing a DSP with a number of accelerators is employed. Alternatively, there exist approaches (e.g. [3]) which make do without a DSP. Instead, the digital baseband processing is implemented in dedicated hardware only. According to literature (e.g. [4]), IR implementation is distributed over various parts of the SoC architecture. In this example, erroneous RLC blocks are stored in an external RAM. An IR control unit is running on the system processor and the unit where RLC blocks are processed for IR is attached to the system processor. The decoding of the RLC blocks takes place in the digital baseband either on the DSP and an accelerator or, in case of [3], in dedicated hardware only. In such a conventional setup the IR mechanism claims high demands for the system processor, which is not desired. And, L2/L3 software developers need to incorporate IR operations. Furthermore, the data bus between external memory and Soc and between system processor and digital baseband can experience high loads due to IR processing. Emerging applications that require ultra low-cost and low-power devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) or machine to machine (M2M) communication, which may use the GSM/EDGE standard due to its ubiquitous coverage, high computational loads are prohibitive. An IR processing block incorporated into the digital baseband comprising all IR related operations, would remove IR complexity and load from the system processor and external components. In this work, above mentioned IR implementation challenges are addressed and an efficient dedicated hardware architecture, which hides the IR complexity from the system processor and higher protocol layers, is proposed. In order to gain insight into the IR mechanisms, an Evolved EDGE capable version of the open-source OsmoPHY GSM physical layer (PHY) framework [5] was equipped with IR functionality. Matlab modules for IR support are added to the OsmoPHY framework. The minimum IR memory size in order to meet the 3GPP throughput requirements, based on the receiver performance of the extended framework and a model RF front-end, is determined. The IR hardware architecture uses a dedicated memory for storing punctured RLC blocks and comprises depuncturing units, memory management, and a soft information combiner unit. A corresponding VHDL model is implemented and synthesized using standard engineering tools. As the OsmocomBB L2/L3 software does not support packet switched communication, the OsmoPHY Matlab model is tested with a minimalistic L2/L3 test-software. We further show that protocol stack developers no longer need to incorporate IR control and management into L2/L3 software, because IR can be detached and implemented in L1 alone. The proposed IR architecture elegantly obfuscates all IR related operations from L2/L3 to such an extent, that higher layers need zero awareness of IR processing. This simplicity can together with OsmoPHY drastically speed up the development of L2/L3 software. Traffic load between system processor and digital baseband are reduced and no external component for IR operations is necessary. This architecture can be incorporated into already existing ultra-low power dedicated hardware PHY implementations such as [3]. This dedicated IR unit can be attached spatially close to the channel decoder unit following the locality principle enabling low-power protocol stacks. [1] 3GPP standard specifications. [2] E. Seurre, P. Savelli, P. Pietri. EDGE for Mobile Internet. Artech House, 2003. [3] C. Benkeser, A. Bubenhofer, Q. Huang, A 4.5mW Digital Baseband Receiver for Level-A Evolved EDGE, IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), San Francisco, CA, USA, Dig. Techn. Papers, pp. 276-277, Feb 7-11, 2010. [4] L. Chang and Y. Wang, Edge Incremental Redundancy Memory Structure and Memory Management, U.S. Patent 7272768, filed December 9, 2003, and issued September 18, 2007 [5] H. Kröll, C. Benkeser, S. Zwicky, B. Weber, Q. Huang, Baseband Signal Processing Framework for the OsmocomBB GSM Protocol Stack, Proc. of SDR 2012 Europe, Brussels, Belgium, June 2012.
Real-Time Validation of a SDR Implementation of TDD WiMAX Standard
Angel Carro Lagoa (University of A Coruña, Spain); Pedro Suárez-Casal (University of A Coruña, Spain); Paula Fraga-Lamas (The University of A Coruña, Spain); José A. García-Naya (University of A Coruña, Spain); Luis Castedo (University of A Coruña, Spain); Antonio Morales Méndez (Indra Sistemas S.A., Spain)
This paper focuses on the validation of an innovative soft-ware-defined radio architecture for a WiMAX system based on commercially available field-programmable gate array and digital signal processor modules. We provide a real-time implementation of a standard-compliant time-division duplex physical layer including a mobile and a base station as well as downlink and uplink communications, thus obtaining a full-featured physical layer. Additionally, a set of different configurations are supported as described in the standard and in the WiMAX Forum. The main contribution of the paper consists in a reproducible and repeatable validation of the implementation in representative scenarios. At the same time, a characterization of the performance exhibited by the system is provided based on bit error rate measurements carried out using a custom-made, real-time channel emulator.
A LTE Receiver Framework Implementation in GNU Radio
Johannes Demel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany); Sebastian Koslowski (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany); Friedrich K. Jondral (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
We present an open source LTE receiver framework. Using GNU Radio's block-based signal processing capabilities, various LTE baseband specific functionality has been implemented in dedicated easily reconfigurable blocks. These can be used to decode and analyze arbitrary channels in the LTE downlink signal. As an example we decode the Master Information Block (MIB) transmitted on the Broadcast Channel (BCH). Our work is focused on performance measurements in order to identify critical processing operations on a General Purpose Processor (GPP). By optimizing critical components, e.g. channel estimation, synchronization, we can improve the overall system performance and therefore the system's real-time capabilities.
Session 3 - Spectrum Efficiency
Modeling Cognitive Radio Equipments for Opportunistic Spectrum Access - Presentation Only
Oussama Lazrak (IETR/SUPELEC, France); Christophe Moy (SUPELEC/IETR, France); Pierre Leray (IETR/Supelec Campus de Rennes, France)
Radio equipments' design is getting more and more complex. The reason is that a radio equipment is no more a single purpose device but also combines several processing devices, states and operation modes. Radio processing is done by a set of electronic circuits, the operations of which are not only wired and hardly pre-defined. They are more and more managed and configured by some software control. This implies a design complexity in terms of span of possible use cases, and makes it more difficult to guaranty a perfect operation in any context. However, current state is just the premise of a future generalization of software and hardware mix. We usually refer to Cognitive Radio (CR) when speaking about future highly flexible and auto-adaptable radio devices [1][2]. Cognitive Radio is a general statement to speak about radio devices that would adapt in real-time to any aspect of their environment, so that they can perfectly match their operation to the current environment state and in function of the current needs [2]. We propose in this presentation to describe a design approach for future cognitive radio equipments in order to ease such equipments' design. The example of an Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA) scenario [3] will be detailed in order to produce a real demonstration as a proof-of-concept using USRP platforms [4]. A Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [5] approach is proposed for the design of Cognitive Radio (CR) equipments. MDA consists in describing a system at different levels of abstraction, from a high level abstraction representation (often graphical) downto the code to be executed into a specific platform (made of pieces of hardware - e.g. executed on ASICs or FPGAs - and software - e.g. executed on DSPs or GPPs -). This approach for CR is equivalent to define a universal language that any designer in the community may understand in order to design CR devices. Associated to this language, a design environment is proposed in order to provide the adequate tools to design the models at each level of abstraction relatively to CR design needs. This work is based on our previous work on HDCRAM . [1] J. Mitola, "Cognitive Radio" " Licentiate proposal, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, Dec. 1998. [2] J. Palicot, "Radio Enineering: From Software radio to Cognitive Radio", Wiley 2011; ISBN: 978-1-84821-296-1 [3] Q. Zhao, A. Swami, "A Survey of Dynamic Spectrum Access: Signal Processing and Networking Perspectives", in IEEE ICASSP: special session on Signal Processing and Networking for Dynamic Spectrum Access, April, 2007 [4] Ettus Research "Products" - accessed 02/04/2012 http://www.ettus.com/products [5] OMG, Object Management Group, "MDA Guide Version 1.0.1", http://www.omg.org/docs/omg/03-06-01.pdf, June 2003 [6] L. Godard, C. Moy, J. Palicot, "An Executable Meta-Model of a Hierarchical and Distributed Architecture Management for the Design of Cognitive Radio Equipments", Annals of Telecommunications special issue on Cognitive Radio, vol. 64, pp.463-482, n°7-8, Aug. 2009
Context-Aware Cognitive Radio
James Neel (Cognitive Radio Technologies, LLC, USA); Peter G. Cook (Hypres, Inc., USA); Ihsan A Akbar (Harris Corporation, USA); Daniel Devasirvatham (SAIC, USA); Charles Sheehe (NASA, USA); Neal Mellen (Wireless Spectrum Management, LLC, USA)
To make effective decisions and communicate effectively, a cognitive radio needs to understand its operating context. Over the past several months, the Wireless Innovation Forum's Cognitive Radio Work Group has been exploring how to enable a cognitive radio to represent, understand, and share its context. Material to be covered in this paper includes the following: • Motivation for the work • What exactly is meant by "context" in varying published existing context aware applications • The role of context in communication in the Information Process Architecture • A survey of tools and software for developing context aware applications • A new model of the interactions of the real world, symbolic reasoning and representation, and acting on the reasoning • Relating the components of a key context aware tool to the new model • Initial work coding a java-based context aware application for a cognitive radio to reason and act on its context This paper will provide greater detail (and context!!) of a presentation given at WinnComm 2013 and provide updates on work performed on the subject since the presentation.
Resilient Indoor to Outdoor TVWS Wireless System for Safety Applications - Presentation Only
Rosolino Lionti (CEA, France); Marc Laugeois (CEA-LETI, France); Dominique Noguet (CEA LETI, France); Vincent Berg (CEA LETI, France)
Fire fighting requires fast response time and resources adapted to the particular situation. The deployment of heavy means is decided through a discussion between first responders and the stakeholders located remotely. As a consequence there is a need for accurate information to select the best solution in the shortest possible time. Video transmission is a valuable add-on to existing audio information. Because of the hazardous environment of a fire, the task of video shooting and transmission is assigned to fire-fighters who have the ability to operate under such difficult conditions. This requires embedding the sensors and transmitter in the first responders' equipment. The harsh environment of fire-fighters during their mission requires a very robust radio to guarantee a video transmission from them to the mobile HQ. Indoor transmissions are prone to multipath propagation, this effect combined with particles and debris in suspension in the air resulting from combustion, reinforced concrete, bad clearance of embedded antenna, limited radiating power, limited weight, etc, makes the development of a radio system very challenging. Depending on the structure and geometry of the buildings and indoor furniture and objects, the electrical field is more or less absorbed/transmitted/rotated. As a consequence multipath propagation "depolarizes" the electrical field vectors between transmitter and receiver, if nothing is done to mitigate this effect, the reliability of the transmission is seriously compromised. Moreover in the case of on-the-body worn devices, the polarisation is continuously changing and needs to be compensated. CEA-LETI has developed a specific resilient wireless system operated in the TVWS bands to address this issue. The specifications system and some of its building blocks were presented at WinnComm Europe 2012. Recently the system has been finalized and test results will be shown in this presentation. The trial consists in the simultaneous transmission, of BW, colour and infrared videos, carried out in a 5-story building located in suburban area. The transmission is carried out over the TVWS, based on a proprietary PHY that will be described. This building is mainly composed of offices, labs and long corridors; the main structure is made of reinforced concrete walls and metallic panels. Windows are equipped with heatstop glass, containing nanoparticles of metal that strongly attenuates the radio waves. However we obtained NLOS indoor to indoor seamless transmissions through large parts of the building and NLOS outdoor to indoor transmissions over 200m of distance. Similar tests with a WIFI radio have been carried out and will be provided for the sake of comparison.
 
 
Session 4 - Tactical Radio Communcations
SDR Standards Conformance and Verification for Tactical Communications SDR Products, an industry perspective - Presentation Only
David Renaudeau (Thales, France); Eric Nicollet (Thales, France)
US SDR Programme for tactical communications, by JTRS Program, has lead to the creation of an eco system. The nature of the program, aiming to port and to develop waveforms to be used across various radio platforms from various origins, requested to set up some testing capabilities of the SDR standards. Other programmes in the world, being either purely national, either multi-national, for example COALWNW or NATO, could require some testing capabilities ; as well international radio vendors face requirements for testing or verification of the standards implemented in their products. While the Wireless Innovation Forum issued in the past reports on test and certification process and approaches, this presentation will provide an industry perspective from a radio vendor.
Reconfigurable NATO-IV RF Front-End for SDR Terminals
Carlos Alemparte (Gradiant, Spain); Florian Palade (Gradiant, Spain); Javier Baltasar (Indra, Spain); Antonio Morales Méndez (Indra Sistemas S.A., Spain); José María Camas Albar (Indra Sistemas S.A., Spain)
The paper describes the development process of a state of the art 2x2 MIMO NATO IV (4.4 GHz - 5 GHz) RF Front End. First, requirements over the design are introduced, where it is important to emphasize that a low phase noise, fast synthesizer tuning time, high spurious rejection and fast AGC solution is pursued in the whole frequency band to allow the compatibility of the Front End with the most innovative wideband waveforms. Second, the paper will present the architecture selected, that is based on COTS SISO WiMAX chipsets but synchronized among them to achieve a MIMO solution. The output frequency of these chipset will be moved into the desired NATO IV RF band by external RF circuitry. Digital control of the architecture is based on reprogrammable devices (FPGA) what allows complete flexibility and reduces the impact for its integration with any digital base band from hardware as well as from software standpoint. Last but not least, an overview of implementation key challenges is provided: critical component selection based on validation by simulation and mock-ups implementation, key PCB implementation issues and the different microwave technologies utilized.
 
Optimization of Squelch Parameters for Efficient Resource Allocation in Software Defined Radios
Rainer Storn (Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG, Germany); Christoph Krall (Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG, Germany); Nesrine Damak (Technische Universität München, Germany)
The squelch function is an important element in almost every radio, especially the airborne radio. It suppresses the audio output of the radio receiver when the desired signal does not have sufficient SNR and/or signal strength. In legacy radios the squelch characteristic has usually evolved through many iterations stemming from customer feedback as well as extensive lab and field tests, so that the user finally experiences the most convenient squelch behaviour. If the computation of the squelch algorithm has to be changed, for example due to efficiency reasons, it must be ensured that the carefully obtained squelch characteristic remains the same, preferably without being forced to redo all iterations mentioned above. This paper describes an optimization-based approach which allows to meet these requirements.
Electronic Warfare using a Software Defined Platform - Presentation Only
Jan Punt (TNO, The Netherlands)
Development of Electronic Warfare (EW) equipment is changing towards software. This will bring benefits as well as challenges for the field of EW. The presentation will discuss Software Defined EW (SDEW), where EW functionality is implemented in software rather than hardware. New features for equipment can be added faster and the inherent flexibility will greatly help EW planners. SDEW will bring many benefits for both manufacturers and users. Before SDEW can be an overall success, the people producing, acquiring and using EW equipment will have to define the goals. We will touch upon the way we could go forward. Then, using SDEW means that equipment can be tailored easily to the mission at hand and that upgrades in software increases equipment life span. Further, a modular approach to SDEW allows procurement to combine equipment from different manufacturers, each with their own strengths. Last, SDEW-equipment could also perform communications, without requiring additional hardware.

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