On the GNU Radio Ecosystem

GNU Radio is an ecosystem for software radio development. It is composed of both the free and open source software and a community of professionals, experts, scientists, hobbyists, and enthusiasts that works on projects from research, prototyping, new models of communications and services, and science experiments. GNU Radio has a thriving community of members and contributors that is constantly pushing the project forward.Such a diverse and thriving user community has helped build GNU Radio into a large project with many tools and capabilities. In this chapter, we explore some of the areas where people are developing increasingly powerful signal systems and exploring new territory. To help understand how we can do so many things in this project, we review the overall architecture of the GNU Radio project as a framework for building software radio solutions. We explain the design principles and methods for moving and processing data within GNU Radio flowgraphs and blocks, and we provide a bit of an exploration into the performance concepts and tradeoffs that the project deals with. Finally, we go over a scenario of using GNU Radio in a dynamic spectrum access scenario to show off some of the powerful tools and concepts within this field of interest.