To promote widespread interest in Software Defined Radio (SDR) and to explore new possibilities in the military and commercial markets, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently held a week-long SDR 'hackfest' ) The eight teams participating in the competition will use software programming radios to control the drones.
Tom Rondeau, Project Manager for DARPA's Microsystems Division, chaired the contest, and prior to joining DARPA last year, Rondeau spent six years leading GNU Radio - a development plan based on the SDR open source architecture.
Rondeau said: 'Software radios can be anything like cellular networks, Wi-Fi, etc., depending on how you program - it's both math and digital.' He described GNU Radio as' a signal-processing specific Domain languages that can be used to develop demodulators, filters, and launchers GNU Radio is a fairly complete toolset available to all R & D teams worldwide.
The hackfest contest could end up with varying results, from assisting the military in blocking enemy communications to launching the billions of wireless devices expected for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).
Rondeau said: "More and more drones face the challenge of spectrum reduction, and we observe that the currently available radios maintain only 50 drone flights in one geographic area, since no other spectrum So, in the next 10-15 years, if we want to have a megabit wireless device, we will need a smarter solution than other Wi-Fi chipsets. "
He explains: 'The teams involved in the competition are all ready to think about the link between ground controls and drones in a software-definable way ... so they may find new modes of operation - based on computer speed What you can imagine when operating ... You can think of a drone as a programmable extension.
He added: "The changes in how to use drones may come from this, but my goal is to get people interested in software radios, programming the spectrum, and applying new knowledge when it comes to focusing on drones."
Link military, hacker and decision maker
However, SDRs still lack strong commercial drivers yet, but the progress of LTE and the upcoming 5G cellular network will help to alleviate the problem of spectral compression mainly through the reduction of the cellular size.
However, he said military strategists "have no time to adopt these standards ... so we started to adjust and manipulate the spectrum to avoid signal interception and interference." As a result, the U.S. Department of Defense continued to use its 'special forces' , Using drones to manipulate the spectrum based on GNU Radio tools.
The competition team involved in Hackfest will represent defense industry, Silicon Valley start-ups and academics from Aerospace Corp., Assured Information Security, Hacker Dojo, Raytheon BBN Technologies, the University of California and Southern Methodist University Methodist University).
Speakers from the competition also came from various fields, including science fiction writers Cory Doctorow, privacy lawyers, Linux Foundation representatives, senior hackers and policy experts.
He said: 'The FCC likes the SDR very much, they do not know how to regulate it, but they always want to figure it out ... The FAA supports the UAV but is very cautious.'
In addition, Rondeau runs a project at DARPA in the hope of exploring ways to bring SDR to embedded systems.
He said: 'Software radios are not yet widely available because of the high computational power and power consumption required, so we are looking at creating low-power processors that can be used near the edge of the sensor near the Internet of Things.' He stressed that domain-specific SoC projects are not limited to SDR applications.
Compile: Susan Hong