Design and implementation of a USRP–SDR based radar experiment

Abstract

Software Defined Radio (SDR) Based Radar is a new radar concept, it was proposed by Professor LU Yilong in NTU, which provides user more flexibility in waveform diversity for radar application. Waveform is generated from SDR Based Radar adaptively in real time environment needed. Compared with traditional radars, SDR Based Radar is more simplicity, use friendly, and real time reaction. The concept of SDR Based Radar will be discussed in this report. GNU Radio is a free open software development toolkit that provides the signal processing runtime and signal processing blocks for users to design and implement with low cost external Radio Frequency (RF) hardware. GNU Radio is widely used in different areas, such as academic and commercial environment to support in wireless communication to implement real time world radio systems. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is designed to allow Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) / Digital-to-analog Converter (DAC), frequency translation functionality of the Radio Frequency front end. In this project, these two technologies which are GNU Radio and Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) have been used to implement the experiment of SDR Based Radar. Use with these two technologies, you can design and implement very sophisticated low cost SDR Based Radar. The concept and background information of GNU Radio and USRP and the experiment based on USRP–SDR Based Radar will be discussed in this report. The design and set up is introduced in this report, followed by the experiment result of testing. Also a discussion on comparison of transmit and receive waveform will be provided. A number of experiments will prove the result is more reliable.