Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] gnuradio land speed record?

[Daniel Halperin]

> On 07/30/2010 09:33 AM, Clark Pope wrote:
> >  I'm curious what people do with the wideband capability of the
> >  gnuradio/usrp and what is the widest bandwidth signal one can really
> >  process with available computers?
> >
> >  What's the most anyone has recorded or processed continuously? What
> >  level of compexity was the processing?
>
>
> With RAID arrays or SSDs, it isn't that hard anymore to sustain 100 MB/s 
> recording to disk.  With 4 and 6 core systems and the i7 architecture you can 
> get more than 5X the performance of your laptop.
>
> There are a lot of applications using the full 25 MHz of RF bandwidth. You 
> just need to pay a lot of attention to efficiency of your program and 
> algorithms.

For 'speed record' type information, you might be interested in SORA, a 
software radio project from Microsoft Research.  They use different 
hardware and custom software, but the fundamentals are the same.

As Matt points out, efficiency is a function of engineering. Using modern 
processors, 64-bit architecture, multicore, software LUTs, and a variety 
of other optimizations they were able to fully process 802.11g signals of 
20 MHz bandwidth and sustain reception of 54 Mbps signals including 
Viterbi decoding, etc.  I see no reason this couldn't be done with 
USRP(2) / GNU Radio... but looking at Microsoft's author list they had a 
lot of developers working pretty hard on it!

There's not a ton of detail in the original paper, and what code is 
available is almost certainly not something you want to look at without 
reading the license very carefully, but here's the link to the project 
website:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/sora/

and the original paper:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=79927

Dan