Making Software Defined Radio on Heterogeneous Computing Systems Easy(-ier)

Viasat Engineering, 2021–22

Liaison(s): Trevor Gile ’03, Thomas Murphy, Gregory Reida, Samuel Welker
Advisor(s): David Harris
Students(s): Tejus Rao (TL-F), Stevie Steinberg (TL-S), Ben Moul, Naiche Whyte-Aguayo (F), Miles Cook (S), Alec Vercruysse (S)

Viasat transforms the world through the power of connection. Viasat is increasingly interested in software-defined radio (SDR), which allows for flexible configuration of communication systems. The clinic team has developed two proof-of-concept designs for an SDR platform called GNU Radio. The first design demonstrates GNU Radio antenna position control and QPSK demodulation on three communicating SDRs. The second design performs GNU Radio QPSK demodulation using a graphics processing unit hardware accelerator to support higher data rates.