GRCon21 - WISCANet - Easy Radio Networks with GNURadio(and friends)

Presented by Jacob Holtom GNU Radio Conference 2021 Implementing novel RF applications has traditionally required significant time and expertise, even for relatively simple algorithms. Software-defined radios (SDRs) enable rapid implementation and validation of RF applications without specialized hardware or advanced programming skills. Many tools have been developed to facilitate SDR development, such as GNURadio as well as language libraries for SDR interfacing, but these approaches tend to not scale beyond single radio systems. To support larger SDR networks, we developed WISCANet to enable GNURadio and other programming languages to quickly operate on networks and larger cooperative experiments, rather than single computer/radio experiments. WISCANet is a comprehensive control software that automatically configures SDR networks with minimal user input, which allows users to quickly implement over-the-air network experiments by simply defining the baseband processing in software. We demonstrate the critical WISCANet capabilities, including: a) flexible, multi-channel phase coherence; b) support for MATLAB (Octave), Python, and GNURadio applications; c) support for larger SDR networks; and d) support for multiple simultaneous SDR networks. The open source release of this software may be found on GitHub at: