Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Physical layer for packet-based communication

[Eric Blossom]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 01:05:57AM -0500, Rahul Dhar wrote:
> Is there a project that provides a physical layer for packet-based
> communication?  Basically, I'm looking for something that includes not a
> just a way of generating waveforms, but also things like framing, i.e.
> detecting beginning/end of packets, checksums, etc.
> 
> I didn't see anything on the Wiki or on the main GNU Radio page.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Rahul

Hi Rahul,

Yes, we're interested in packet based comms.  For a quick demo, we put
together a very simple minded framing scheme that is used by the
FSK tx and rx code in gnuradio-examples/python/usrp1/fsk_{tx,rx}.py

I'm sure you can come up with a better/faster strategy.

Continuing on the packet comms thread, I'm investigating reasonable
ways to get packets in and out of GNU Radio.  A couple of variations
come to mind.  We could provide a fake ethernet or IP interface and
allow external apps to push packets through that (similar to the click
modular router).  The packets could be decorated with key/value pairs
to provide attributes to the MAC or PHY layer, or we could pass
undecorated packets, and then use some other out-of-band means
(socket?) to control attributes in the lower layers.

Thoughts or comments?  What would you like to see?

Eric