A GNU-based packet radio for network management field testing

Software Defined Radios advanced in the recent years to become the platform of choice for new military and emergency response applications, enabling such functionality as single hardware-multiple waveforms, agile spectrum reuse, and cross layer reconfiguration and optimization. Yet, the choice of platforms available for experimenting new adaptation strategies and re-configuration capabilities is severely limited due to proprietary and canned implementations and architectures. GNU Radio represents an open source radio platform operating on a general purpose processor (GPP,) capable of offering an unprecedented level of re-configurability using common and accessible programming languages and paradigms. As such, it represents an attractive and cost effective platform for experimenting with reconfigurable radio technologies. Yet, GNU Radio had been used so far mainly for experimenting with physical layer algorithms, making it less suitable for data packet radio and networking applications. This paper describes our effort to augment the GNU radio to transform it into a practical platform for communication in tactical ad-hoc networks, while maintaining its dynamic re-configurability capabilities. The results of this effort enabled us to create a deployable network capable of supporting the development and testing of TITAN NM, an integrated network management system with autonomous re-configuration capabilities, and its successful evaluation in C4ISR OTM 2012.