SDR-Based Transceiver of Digital Communication System Using USRP and GNU Radio

Transmission over wireless channel is challenging. As such, different application required different signal processing approach of radio system. So, a highly reconfigurable radio system is on great demand as the traditional fixed and embedded radio system are not viable to cater the needs for frequently change requirements of wireless communication. A software defined radio or better known as an SDR, is a software-based radio platform that offers flexibility to deliver the highly reconfigurable system requirements. This approach allows a different type of communication system requirements such as standard, protocol, or signal processing method, to be deployed by using the same set of hardware and software such as USRP and GNU Radio respectively. For researchers, this approach has opened the door to extend their studies in simulation domain into experimental domain. However, the realization of SDR concept is inherently limited by the analog components of the hardware being used. Despite that, the implementation of SDR is still new yet progressing, thus, this paper intends to provide an insight about its viability as a high re-configurable platform for communication system. This paper presents the SDR-based transceiver of common digital modulation system by means of GNU Radio and USRP.