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: