A Software-Defined Radio Tool for Experimenting with RSS Measurements in IEEE 802.15.4: Implementation and Applications

This paper presents an open source Software-Defined Radio tool compliant with IEEE 802.15.4, which incorporates features for the collection and processing of Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements from incoming packets. The implementation includes RSS Indicator (RSSI) feature, data handling and application code for channel estimation, ranging and localization. The tool can be used for experimenting with RSSI measurements from over-the-air IEEE 802.15.4 packets. To illustrate the tool usage, we present experimental results on packets sniffed from commercial ZigBee nodes. Moreover, we highlight some issues in the RSSI calculation, showing how different aspects of the RSS computation can be investigated at the finest granularity, hence allowing researchers and practitioners to experiment down to the PHY layer.