research-article

Software radio on smartphones: feasible?

Authors:

Hyogon KimAuthors Info & Claims

HotMobile '14: Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications

Article No.: 17, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/2565585.2565594

Published: 26 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In this work-in-progress paper, we explore the expected impacts, the reality, and the technical issues of making MAC/PHY protocols downloadable softwares (like apps) for smartphones. The notion of software radio on a small number of fixed stations has been investigated for decades, but moving its platform to billions of smartphones and even making it downloadable as an app has never been attempted. We firmly believe that such attempt could open new fronts for the software radio research. Beyond considering its possible impacts and ramifications, we demonstrate through measurements that today's smartphone hardware is already capable enough to support the real-time execution of down-loadable MAC/PHY software. It is certainly true for low-speed technologies such as ZigBee, and is close to providing real-time operation of higher-speed technologies like Wi-Fi. In our study, we also find that different application processor architectures lead to different bottlenecks in the MAC/PHY processing chain. This implies that the design of protocols that might be executed in software on general-purpose platforms should factor in the processor architecture like multiple cores and SIMD instruction sets, as it will facilitate the softwarization of wireless communication protocols in the future.

References

[1]

P. Johnson, "New Research Lab Leads to Unique Radio Receiver," E-Systems Team, 5(4), May 1985. http://chordite.com/team.pdf.

[2]

P. Hoeher and H. Lang, "Coded-8PSK modem for fixed and mobile satellite services based on DSP," in Proc. First Int. Workshop on Digital Signal Processing Techniques Applied to Space Communications, Nov. 1988.

[3]

K. Tan, H. Liu, J. Zhang, Y. Zhang, J. Fang, and G. Voelker, "Sora: High-Performance Software Radio Using General-Purpose Multi-Core Processors," Communications of the ACM (CACM), 54(1), Jan. 2011.

Digital Library

[4]

J. Kim, S. Hyeon, and S. Choi, "Impelementation of an SDR System Using Graphics Processing Unit," IEEE Communications Magazine, March 2010.

Digital Library

[5]

Gartner, "Gartner Says Smartphone Sales Accounted for 55 Percent of Overall Mobile Phone Sales in Third Quarter of 2013," Nov. 2013. Available at: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2623415.

[6]

S. S. Hong, J. Mehlman, and S. Katti, "Picasso: Flexible RF and Spectrum Slicing," in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, 2012.

Digital Library

[7]

H. Lee, A Baseband Processor for Software Defined Radio Terminals, Ph.D. Thesis, U. of Michigan, 2007.

Digital Library

[8]

Texas Instruments, "Small Form Factor SDR Development Platform," Product Bulletin, http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/sprt434a/sprt434a.pdf.

[9]

WARP: Wireless Open Access Research Platform, http://warp.rice.edu/trac.

[10]

M. Cummings and S. Haruyama, "FPGA in the Software Radio," IEEE Communications Magazine, 1999.

Digital Library

[11]

J. Glossner, E. Hokenek, and M. Moudgill, "The Sandbridge Sandblaster Communication Processor," in Proceedings of 3rd Workshop on application Specific Processors, 2004.

[12]

T. Schmid, "GNU Radio 802.15.4 En- and Decoding," unpublished document and source, 2006. Available at: http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/document/show/282.

[13]

P. Dutta, Y.-S. Kuo, A. Ledeczi, T. Schmid, and P. Volgyesi, "Putting the Software Radio on a Low-Calorie Diet," in Proceedings of HotNets, Oct. 2010.

Digital Library

[14]

Ettus Research, LLC. http://www.ettus.com/.

[15]

Android Debug Bridge, http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html.

Cited By

(2018)Transmission power control and sensor node reprogramming for smartphone-WSN interactionInternational Journal of Sensor Networks10.1504/IJSNET.2017.08789825:4(259-271)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/IJSNET.2017.087898
Park YKuk SKang IKim H(2017)Overcoming IoT Language Barriers Using Smartphone SDRsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2016.257074916:3(816-828)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TMC.2016.2570749
Park YHa JKim HKo J(2016)Enabling Sensor Network to Smartphone Interaction Using Software RadiosACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/300217713:1(1-26)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3002177
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Software radio on smartphones: feasible?
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Personal computers and PC applications
2. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
    1. Signal processing systems

Recommendations

Demo: software defined radio: on a smartphone, as an app!
MobiCom '14: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking

In this demo, we showcase the first software defined radio (SDR) implementation that runs on today's smartphones. Using the SDR, the smartphones are shown to talk to real IEEE 802.15.4 devices such as sensor motes or Phillips Hue (TM) lightbulbs that ...
Secure Software Installation on Smartphones

This overview of iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian security frameworks includes a novel classification of third-party-application installation models. It also discusses how controlled app marketplaces fit in the smartphone security ecosystem.
Reconciling mobile app privacy and usability on smartphones: could user privacy profiles help?
WWW '14: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web

As they compete for developers, mobile app ecosystems have been exposing a growing number of APIs through their software development kits. Many of these APIs involve accessing sensitive functionality and/or user data and require approval by users. ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

HotMobile '14: Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications

February 2014

134 pages

ISBN:9781450327428

DOI:10.1145/2565585

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 February 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

KEIT and the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology

Conference

HotMobile '14

Sponsor:

SIGMOBILE

HotMobile '14: 15th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications

February 26 - 27, 2014

California, Santa Barbara

Acceptance Rates

HotMobile '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 72 submissions, 31%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 96 of 345 submissions, 28%

Upcoming Conference

HOTMOBILE '25

Sponsor:
sigmobile

The 26th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications

February 26 - 27, 2025

La Quinta , CA , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
228
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)3
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 22 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

(2018)Transmission power control and sensor node reprogramming for smartphone-WSN interactionInternational Journal of Sensor Networks10.1504/IJSNET.2017.08789825:4(259-271)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/IJSNET.2017.087898
Park YKuk SKang IKim H(2017)Overcoming IoT Language Barriers Using Smartphone SDRsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2016.257074916:3(816-828)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TMC.2016.2570749
Park YHa JKim HKo J(2016)Enabling Sensor Network to Smartphone Interaction Using Software RadiosACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/300217713:1(1-26)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3002177
Giustiniano DQing Wang (2015)OpenVLC, an open-source platform for the Internet of Light2015 IEEE Summer Topicals Meeting Series (SUM)10.1109/PHOSST.2015.7248178(31-32)Online publication date: Jul-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/PHOSST.2015.7248178
Wang QGiustiniano DPuccinelli D(2015)An open source research platform for embedded visible light networkingIEEE Wireless Communications10.1109/MWC.2015.709629122:2(94-100)Online publication date: Apr-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/MWC.2015.7096291

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents