A software-defined radio tool for experimenting with RSS measurements in IEEE 802.15.4: implementation and applications

摘要

This paper presents an open source software-defined radio (SDR) 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 localisation. The tool can be used for experimenting with RSSI measurements from over-the-air IEEE 802.15.4 packets. Moreover, it enables experimental research on RSS-related aspects that is not possible with commercial devices, even development boards, which are closed platforms. To illustrate the tool usage, we show experimental results based on packets sniffed from commercial ZigBee nodes. Moreover, we present a complete application to the problem of localisation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), with experimental comparison of different algorithms. Finally, 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.