SpectrumWare

The SpectrumWare project is applying a software oriented approach to wireless communication and distributed signal processing. Advances in processor and analog-to-digital conversion technology have made it possible to implement virtual radios that directly sample wide bands of the downconverted RF spectrum, and process these samples in application software. The elimination of dedicated hardware introduces tremendous flexibility into a wireless communications system. However, our approach goes further than the software implementation of traditional signal processing functions. We use processor and network memory to temporally decouple the sample streams from the software modules so that the bulk of the processing can be realized within virtual time programming environments. Decoupling relaxes the temporal constraints on the processing algorithms and their execution. The testbed will be used to implement a wireless communication system and to experiment with other forms of transducer-based information appliances.

People

John Guttag
David Tennenhouse
Mike Saginaw
Matt Welborn
John Ankcorn
Brett Vasconcellos
Sunil Rao
Matt Brown
Joshua Jacobs
Ripal Nathuji
Rattapoom Tuchinda
Alumni
You ? Check out our student projects.

Scientific American Article

Communicating Chameleons

Publications and Reports

Matt Welborn Direct Waveform Synthesis for Software Radios, to appear in Proceedings of WCNC'99.

Matt Welborn and John Ankcorn Waveform Synthesis for Transmission of Complex Waveforms, to appear in Proceedings of RAWCON'99.

V. Bose, M. Ismert, M. Welborn, J. Guttag, Virtual Radios, to appear in in IEEE/JSAC, Special Issue on Software Radios, first quarter 1999.

M. Welborn Narrowband Channel Extraction for Wideband Receivers, to appear in Proceedings of ICASSP'99.

T. Turletti, H. Bentzen and D.L. Tennenhouse, Towards the Software Realization of a GSM Base Station, IEEE/JSAC, Special Issue on Software Radios, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 603-612, April, 1999.

V. G. Bose and A. B. Shah, Software Radios for Wireless Networking, accepted to Infocomm '98, San Francisco, April, 1997.

T. Turletti and D. L. Tennenhouse, Estimating the Computational Requirements of a Software GSM Base Station, to appear in Proc. of ICC'97, Montreal, June 8-12, 1997.

V. G. Bose, A. G. Chiu and D. L. Tennenhouse, Virtual Sample Processing: Extending the Reach of Multimedia, Multimedia Tools and Applications, Volume 5, No. 3, 1997.

A. B. Shah, Software-Based Implementation of a Frequency Hopping Two Way Radio MIT Master's Thesis, May 1997.

S. R. Thadani, A Software-Based Ultrasound System for Medical Diagnosis , MIT Master's Thesis, May 1997.

D. L. Tennenhouse, T. Turletti and V. G. Bose, The SpectrumWare Testbed for ATM-Based Software Radios, to appear in ICUCP'96 Proceedings, Boston, MA, Sept. 29 - Oct. 2, 1996.

D. L. Tennenhouse, V. G. Bose, The SpectrumWare Approach to Wireless Signal Processing, to appear in Wireless Networks, 1999.

T. Turletti, A Brief Overview of the GSM Radio Interface, MIT Technical Memorandum, TM-547, March 1996, (html).

D. L. Tennenhouse and V. G. Bose, "SpectrumWare - A Software-Oriented Approach to Wireless Signal Processing," presented at ACM Mobile Computing and Networking 95, Berkeley, CA, November 1995.

Testbed Activities

Overview poster (PowerPoint).
GuPPI (General Purpose PCI I/O) description.

Demo