The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines a variety of physical and MAC layer protocols that could be used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Experimenting with different physical layer protocols, however, can be cumbersome. Physical layer mechanisms are normally implemented in hardware, so changing the protocol often requires changing the transceiver chip. By using a software signal processing framework like GNURadio, switching physical layers or just changing some parameters of existing physical layers can be done quite easily. Since existing implementations mostly focus on the physical and MAC layer, I implemented parts of the Rime network stack for GNURadio. The goal of doing this was to build a Software Defined Radio (SDR) that is interoperable with sensor nodes up to the application layer. Tests in a small heterogeneous network showed that the SDRs are indeed able to communicate among themselves as well as with sensor nodes. Furthermore, I measured the Round Trip Time (RTT) of packets sent by the SDR to evaluate the performance of the SDR. These measurements showed, that while the RTT using SDRs is lower than the one of sensor nodes, it is still too high to meet the IEEE 802.15.4 standard's timing constraints for MAC acknowledgements. In spite of that, I think the implementation can be used for educational purposes, as well as further research, if MAC layers that are not dependent on these constraints are used.
Christoph Leitner
@phdthesis{leitner2013integration,
author = {Leitner, Christoph},
advisor = {Bloessl, Bastian and Sommer, Christoph},
title = {{Integration of the Rime Network Stack into GNU Radio}},
institution = {Institute of Computer Science},
year = {2013},
month = {October},
school = {University of Innsbruck},
type = {Bachelor Thesis},
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