µSDR: Low-Power Software-Defined Radio

An Experimental Platform for Low-Power Wireless Networking Research

Duration: May 1, 2010 → April 30, 2014 (Completed)

Synopsis Software-defined radios are reconfigurable communication systems that transcend historical boundaries between hardware and software subsystems, physical and logical layers, and analog and digital domains. In so doing, they enable radical new architectures, novel radio designs, and high-performance wireless protocols that are not easy to design, implement, or evaluate using traditionally-layered approaches that rigidly partition functionality. Although modern SDR platforms have been used to explore many facets of the wireless design space, their typical architecture makes it very difficult to explore the small, inexpensive, and low-power design space. As a result, important application domains like mobile phones, sensor networks, visible light communications, and radio frequency localization--that could benefit from radical approaches, but which require small form factors, low unit costs, or low-power operation--remain relatively unexplored. This project demonstrates that a software radio with an index card form factor that costs $150 and offers smartphones battery life from just a pack of 'AA 'batteries is possible, and that it enables new research.

The intellectual merit of this work lies in a hardware and software platform that allows flexible partitioning of applications across system resources--either by time-multiplexing computations on shared resources like a central processing unit, or parallelizing those computations on dedicated resources like an underlying FPGA fabric--using a software-radio and its applications as the motivating testbed. Several applications are themselves novel contributions, including A-MAC (a receiver-initiated wireless protocol that offered best-in-class performance) and Harmonia (an RF TDoA localization system).

The broader impacts of this work stem from its enabling nature for many research topics in low-power wireless networking including protocol design (e.g. receiver-initiated protocols, concurrent transmissions, efficient flooding), software-defined lighting applications (e.g. lighting, energy efficiency, visible light communications, visible light positioning, optical time synchronization, and others), and RF-based localization (e.g. tracking the position of quadrotors indoors at high update rates). The ideas pioneered in the program have led to new commerical SDR systems and improvement to FPGA technology to better support low-power SDR, and have launched or accelerated new academic research areas. Key among these include receiver-initiated communications, concurrent transmissions, and software-defined lighting. The program has also helped train multiple graduate students. Its artifacts have been adopted for undergraduate computer engineering courses and its intellectual property has been open-sourced for third parties to freely use and build upon.

Personnel At Michigan, researchers on this project include the following members of Lab 11:

Collaborators This project is a collaborative effort with others, including:

Educational The key educational activity supported by the project is the introduction of the embedded platform into the EECS 373 course "Design of Microprocessor-Based Systems" at the University of Michigan. This has introduced hundreds of students to the world of low-power embedded system design, including function partitioning across hardware (FPGA) and software (CPU).
Artifacts

Source code for artifacts produced under this project include:

The hardware design files are available online at the following link.

Publications This project supported the following publications:

⟨⟨ 2014 ⟩⟩

  1. "Gemini: A Non-Invasive, Energy-Harvesting True Power Meter,"
    Bradford Campbell and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS'14),
    Rome, Italy, Dec. 2-5, 2014. To appear.

  2. "An Energy-Harvesting Sensor Architecture and Toolkit for Building Monitoring,"
    Bradford Campbell and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys'14),
    Memphis, TN, Nov. 5-6, 2014. To appear.

  3. "Opo: A Wearable Sensor for Capturing High-Fidelity Face-to-Face Interactions,"
    William Huang, Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys'14),
    Memphis, TN, Nov. 3-6, 2014. To appear.

  4. "MBus: A 17.5 pJ/bit/chip Portable Interconnect Bus for Millimeter-Scale Sensor Systems with 8 nW Standby Power,"
    Ye-sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Gyouho Kim, Zhiyoong Foo, Inhee Lee, Ben Kempke, Prabal Dutta, David Blaauw, and Yoonmyung Lee,
    In IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC'14),
    San Jose, CA, Sep. 14-17, 2014. To appear.

  5. "Harmonia: Wideband Spreading for Accurate Indoor RF Localization,"
    Benjamin Kempke, Pat Pannuto, and Prabal Dutta,
    In The 1st ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Wireless (HotWireless'14),
    Maui, HI, Sep. 11, 2014. To appear.

  6. "Luxapose: Indoor Positioning with Mobile Phones and Visible Light,"
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Ko-Jen Hsiao, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'14),
    Maui, HI, Sep. 7-11, 2014. To appear.

  7. "System Architecture Directions for a Software-Defined Lighting Infrastructure,"
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, and Prabal Dutta,
    In The 1st ACM Workshop on Visible Light Communication Systems (VLCS'14),
    Maui, HI, Sep. 7, 2014. To appear.

  8. "Deltaflow: Submetering by Synthesizing Uncalibrated Pulse Sensor Streams,"
    Meghan Clark, Bradford Campbell, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference of Future Energy Systems (e-Energy'14),
    Cambridge, UK, Jun. 11-13, 2014.

  9. "A Mobile Phone-Based Breath Carbon Monoxide Meter to Detect Cigarette Smoking,"
    Steven Meredith, Andrew Robinson, Philip Erb, Claire Spieler, Noah Klugman, Prabal Dutta, and Jesse Dallery,
    In Oxford Journal of Nicotine and Tobacco Research (JNTR'14), 2014.

⟨⟨ 2013 ⟩⟩

  1. "Monjolo: An Energy-Harvesting Energy Meter Architecture,"
    Samuel DeBruin, Bradford Campbell, Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys'13),
    Rome, Italy, Nov. 11-14, 2013.

⟨⟨ 2012 ⟩⟩

  1. "AudioDAQ: Turning the Mobile Phone's Ubiquitous Headset Port into a Universal Data Acquisition Interface,"
    Sonal Verma, Andrew Robinson, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys'12),
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Nov. 6-9, 2012.

  2. "Reconfiguring the Software Radio to Improve Power, Price, and Portability,"
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Thomas Schmid, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys'12),
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Nov. 6-9, 2012.

  3. "Wireless Packet Collisions Sometimes Considered Helpful," (Invited Paper)
    Ye-Sheng Kuo and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing (Allerton'12),
    Allerton, IL, USA, Oct. 1-5, 2012. To appear.

  4. "A-MAC: Design and Evaluation of a Versatile and Efficient Receiver-Initiated Link Layer for Low-Power Wireless,"
    Prabal Dutta, Stephen Dawson-Haggerty, Yin Chen, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, and Andreas Terzis,
    In Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN'12), Vol. 8, No. 4, Sep. 2012.

  5. "Grafting Energy-Harvesting Leaves onto the Sensornet Tree,"
    Lohit Yerva, Bradford Campbell, Apoorva Bansal, Thomas Schmid, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'12),
    Beijing, China, Apr. 16-20, 2012.

⟨⟨ 2011 ⟩⟩

  1. "Exploring Powerline Networking for the Smart Building,"
    Pat Pannuto and Prabal Dutta,
    In Extending the Internet to Low power and Lossy Networks (IP+SN'11),
    Chicago, IL, United States, Apr. 11, 2011.

⟨⟨ 2010 ⟩⟩

  1. "Hijacking Power and Bandwidth from the Mobile Phone's Audio Interface,"
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Sonal Verma, Thomas Schmid, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV'10),
    London, United Kingdom, Dec. 17-18, 2010.

  2. "A Case for Custom Silicon in Enabling Low-Cost Information Technology for Developing Regions,"
    Z. Foo, D. Devecsery, T. Schmid, N. Clark, R. Frank, M. Ghaed, Y. Kuo, I. Lee, Y. Park, Z. Renner, N. Slottow, V. Vinay, M. Wieckowski, D. Yoon, C. Schmidt, D. Blaauw, P. Chen, and P. Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV'10),
    London, United Kingdom, Dec. 17-18, 2010.

  3. "Design and Evaluation of a Versatile and Efficient Receiver-Initiated Link Layer for Low-Power Wireless,"
    Prabal Dutta, Stephen Dawson-Haggerty, Yin Chen, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, and Andreas Terzis,
    In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys'10),
    Zurich, Switzerland, Nov. 3-5, 2010. [PPT|TOS Tree|A-MAC Source]. Best Paper Award.

  4. "A Case Against Routing-Integrated Time Synchronization,"
    Thomas Schmid, Zainul Charbiwala, Zafeiria Anagnostopoulou, Mani Srivastava, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys'10),
    Zurich, Switzerland, Nov. 3-5, 2010.

  5. "Meter Any Wire, Anywhere by Virtualizing the Voltage Channel,"
    Thomas Schmid, David Culler, and Prabal Dutta,
    In 2nd ACM Workshop On Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings (Buildsys'10),
    Zurich, Switzerland, Nov. 2, 2010.

  6. "Putting the Software Radio on a Low-Calorie Diet,"
    Prabal Dutta, Ye-Sheng Kuo, Akos Ledeczi, Thomas Schmid, and Peter Volgyesi,
    In Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-IX),
    Monterey, California, Oct. 20-21, 2010. [PPT].

  7. "Hijacking Power and Bandwidth from the Mobile Phone's Audio Interface," (unpublished contest entry),
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Thomas Schmid, and Prabal Dutta,
    In International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED'10),
    Austin, Texas, Aug. 18-20, 2010. Design Contest Winner.

  8. "Disentangling Wireless Sensing from Mesh Networking,"
    Thomas Schmid, Roy Shea, Mani Srivastava, and Prabal Dutta,
    In Workshop on Hot Topics in Embedded Networked Sensors (HotEmNets'10),
    Killarney, Ireland, Jun. 28-29, 2010. Best Paper Award.

  9. "High-Resolution, Low-Power Time Synchronization an Oxymoron No More,"
    Thomas Schmid, Prabal Dutta, and Mani Srivastava,
    In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'10),
    Stockholm, Sweden, Apr. 12-16, 2010. Best Paper Award.
Support
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award #0964120 (CNS-NeTS). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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