2010 Second International conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies

Implementation of a Low Cost Synthetic

Aperture Radar using Software Defined Radio
Deepthi Maheswari Chinnam, Madhusudhan J., Nandhini C., Prathyusha S.N., Sowmiya Sw.,
Ramanathan R*, Dr. Soman K.P.
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India
*
r_ramanathan@cb.amrita.edu

Abstract GNU radio is a free open-source software toolkit for
building software radios, in which software defines the
transmitted waveforms and demodulates the received waveforms.
In this paper an attempt has been made to explore the means to
use a Software Defined Radio (SDR) to implement a basic radar
system and then synthetic aperture radar. An experiment where
in readings at two different scenarios (free environment and metal
object) are taken into account and their plots are also given. This
has been attempted keeping in mind the exponential increase in
chip computing power and the ability to upgrade a radio
transceiver via software updates with a marginal investment, the
two features which makes such a foray attractive, technology wise
and cost wise. This attempt also takes us a step closer to
establishing the concept of a Cognitive radar which is software
signal processing intensive.
Keywords GNU Radio, Synthetic Aperture Radar, Software
defined radio (SDR)
I. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
The flexibility of software based systems with regards to
various use cases and adaptability to a variable environment
will make them mainstream for many different applications.
SDR reflects the convergence of two very dynamic
technologies: digital signal processing and real-time
downloadable software run on very fast microprocessors. GNU
Radio is an open source software-defined radio project, and the
Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is hardware
designed specifically for use with GNU Radio. Together, these
two technologies have been used to implement very
sophisticated, low cost, SDRs. Since SDR and software-
defined radar are really one in the same technologies, it stands
to reason that GNU Radio and the USRP could be utilized to
form a low cost radar sensor. In this paper, the viability of a
prototype software-defined Synthetic Aperture Radar, built
using the open source GNU Radio[3] and open specification
USRP [4] has been discussed.
The first use of SDR was by the US Department of Defence
and NATO who created the Joint Tactical Radio System
(JTRS) initiative to develop a family of SDR and Cognitive
Radio. The spill over effect to the civilian sector is the
establishment of low cost community radios and the evolution
of cognitive medium access (CMA) as a protocol for their
coexistence within independently evolving WLAN bands. Now
various SDR architectures are used for purposes ranging from
distress signalling in natural calamities to enabling of
international roaming by service providers.
II. SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR (SAR)
RADAR (radio detection and ranging) is a widely used
system which uses electromagnetic waves for the detection of
objects, for terrain mapping and for weather forecasts.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a type of imaging radar that
has wide range applications in obtaining the digital elevation
models of the earths surface and in remote sensing [2]. The
main advantage of SAR is the high resolution in spite of a
small antenna that is obtained by using the property of Doppler
shift of the backscattered signals. Another advantage of SAR
over other imaging systems such as LIDAR (Light detection
and Ranging) and optical imaging is that SAR can see through
clouds. In SAR, both the amplitude and phase of the return
signals are used for obtaining the images.
The main blocks of an SAR system are the RF (radio
frequency) front-end and the signal processor. The RF front-
end consists of a transmitter, receiver, mixers, low noise
amplifiers, analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) and digital-to-
analog convertor (DAC). The analog signals from the receiver
are digitized and are given as the input to the digital signal
processor. The processor performs various frequency domain
operations such as Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) on the raw
data and produces the final SAR image. Figure 1 shows the
block diagram of a typical SAR.

978-1-4244-6589-7/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE


Fig.1: Block Diagram of a Typical SAR
The SAR images are two-dimensional in nature as both
azimuth and range measurements are considered for image
formation. The raw SAR data are points which are spread out
in both range and along-track (azimuth) directions. These
points are converted into a 2-D image by complex signal
processing steps. Focusing is the process of correlation which
produces a high resolution image. After focusing, multi-
looking is done so as to improve the resolution of the image.
Due to the coherent nature of SAR imaging, speckle (grainy
appearance) is produced due to the variance in the backscatter
of different pixel cells. Speckle filtering is one of the most
important signal processing steps. Geocoding, radiometric
calibration and normalization are done so as to obtain a more
accurate image of the terrain.
III. NEED FOR THE PROPOSAL
The digital systems are increasingly using programmable
hardware modules at different functional levels. SDR
technology aims to take advantage of these programmable
hardware modules to build open-architecture based radio
system software. SDR technology facilitates implementation of
some of the functional modules in a radio system such as
modulation or demodulation, signal generation, coding and
link-layer protocols in software. This helps in building
reconfigurable software radio systems where dynamic selection
of parameters for each of the above-mentioned functional
modules is possible. A complete hardware based radio system
has limited utility since parameters for each of the functional
modules are fixed.
Implementation of functions such as FIR filter, sharp roll
off and liner phase in hardware is not very easy, whereas these
functions can be implemented in SDR as custom blocks and
can be used wherever necessary. When we implement signal
processing blocks in the hardware of conventional Radars,
tuning and tweaking to a particular frequency may not be that
accurate compared to the values that we can give in SDR.
When an application requires the interoperability between
different Radar systems rather than conventional radars, radars
using SDR has better potential for interoperability. Moreover
Radars using SDR have high sampling rate, high performance
data converters (ADCs & DACs), Wideband Tunable Analog
RF Transceiver Front-Ends, Flash Memory and Wideband
Linear RF Power Amplifiers.
SDR technology promises to solve the problem of
incompatible technologies and constant evolution of link layer
protocol standards by implementing the radio functionality as
software modules running on a generic hardware platform.
Further, multiple software modules implementing different
standards can be present in the radio system. The system can
take up different personalities depending on the software
module being used. Also, the software modules that implement
new services or features can be downloaded over-the-air onto
the handsets. The actual software being used is GNU Radio,
which is an open source software-defined radio project.
IV. SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO
A software defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication
system where components (e.g. filters, mixers, amplifiers,
modulators/demodulators, detectors) that have been
implemented in hardware are instead implemented in software
on a personal computer or other embedded computing devices
(Fig.2). SDR technologies are attractive for communication
systems because of reconfigurable and multimode operation
capabilities. The reconfigurable feature is useful for enhancing
functions of equipment without replacing hardware. Multimode
operation is essential for future wireless terminals because a
number of wireless communication standards will co-exist.
Compared to traditional hardware-oriented approaches such as
DSP and FPGA-based solutions, a true SDR base station is
highly modular and enables a high degree of software
portability and reuse, minimizing the amount of code to be re-
written to keep pace with advanced technologies. So, at a
certain stage in the receiving chain the signal is digitized and
passed to the software domain.SDR is divided into two sub-
systems-the hardware subsystem and the software subsystem.
In general SDR consists of an antenna, an ADC and a software
defined subsystem. Realizing such a device would require that
each of the three following conditions is met:
The antenna should be capable to operate at the
frequency of all radio signals of interest;
The ADC and the DAC should have a sampling rate
greater than two times the frequency of the signals of
interest;
The software subsystem should have enough
processing power to handle the signal processing of
all radio signals of interest.
In a typical SDR the hardware-defined subsystem consists
of a wideband Radio FE that takes a portion of spectrum and
shifts it to the IF prior to digitization. The software-defined
subsystem receives the digital wideband signal, sends it to a set
of digital down converters to isolate the required carrier, and
proceeds with the demodulation.
FPGA
(ADC,
Antenna DAC, PC/Laptop
(Daughte USB
r Boards) Control,
Digital
Down/Up
Conversion)
USRP

Fig.2 Block Diagram of an Ideal SDR
V. SAR USING SDR
The focus of this paper is not the design of a new radar
sensor, but an investigation of the utility of existing hardware
and software for software-defined radar applications.
Therefore, the performance of the sensor hardware is evaluated
in order to determine the applications for which the sensor is
suitable.
Fig.3: Block diagram of radar software functionality
The radar transmit waveform is read in from a data file by
the transmit signal processing block (TX block), which pushes
this data into a software first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffer
controlled by the GR framework. The GR framework
facilitates the transfer of this FIFO data over the USB to the
USRP where it is pushed into a FIFO on the FPGA. The USRP
transmit signal processing path then pulls the data from this
buffer as needed. An identical situation exists for the received
data path except that the flow of data occurs in the opposite
direction. In order to prevent underruns or overflows of
information in the buffers, the Tx and Rx signal processing
blocks must produce or consume the amount of data requested
by the GR framework each time the block is called. Therefore,
the transmitter and receiver must been enabled at all times.
Because the system is transmitting and receiving
simultaneously, each signal path can be allocated one-half of
the USB bandwidth. Note that one might be tempted to
implement a scheme in which the system is in either transmit
A radar sensor must be capable of transmitting and
receiving data such that the time between pulse transmission
and reception can be known exactly. That is there should be
time coherence and time-synchronization. A stream of digital
data samples is time-coherent if a time value can be assigned to
each sample such that the difference in the time values
assigned to any two samples is equal to the difference between
the actual times at which the samples are converted from, an
analog signal. Therefore if the system is time-coherent, then
the discrete data signal accurately represents its analog
counterpart in time [1]. Thus the definition of time-coherence
is concerned only with the duration between samples, and not
the actual times at which these samples were converted. Two
streams of digital data are said to lack time-synchronization if
each stream is time-coherent within itself, but the two-streams
are not time-coherent with respect to one another. In radar
systems, time synchronization must exist between the transmit
and receive data streams. Therefore, obtaining time-
synchronization must be addressed explicitly.
or receive mode at a given time. However, this is not possible
due to the asynchronous nature of the underlying systems.
VI. IMPLEMENTATION
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is a
device which turns general purpose computers into flexible
SDR platforms [4]. The USRP consists of a motherboard with
four high-speed ADCs and DACs and an Altera Cyclone
EP1C12 FPGA. The ADCs/DACs are connected to the radio
FEs (called daughter boards), while the FPGA is connected to a
USB2 interface chip to a general purpose computer. The high
speed general purpose processing, like down and up
conversion, decimation, and interpolation are performed in the
FPGA and the resulting digital signal is sent to a computer via
the USB2 port. Thus, the USRP converts the RF signal to the
baseband or IF (intermediate frequency) signal. The GNU
Radio software is then used to manipulate the digital data.

Fig.4: Internal and external view of USRP kit
By using the software defined radio (SDR), most of
the hardware blocks in radar such as the modulator, waveform
generator, demodulator and the signal processor in software in
terms of their digital equivalents can be implemented. The
equivalent digital filters of the analog filters used in the normal
radar are found using the bilinear transformation technique.
The GNU Radio software, an open source freeware, is used for
Fig.5: Block diagram of software-defined radar in time synchronization mode
B. The Receive Signal Processing Block
The constructor of this block accepts arguments which
specify a pointer to the transmit block which allows the two
blocks to communicate, the file to which the received data
should be stored, how many samples of each PRI should be
recorded to file and the number of samples to be ignored in
each PRI until the receiver should begin recording. Upon
instantiation, the receiver checks the system state. If the system
is in the WAIT state it simply ignores all input samples. If the
systems is in the SYNC, PREAMBLE or TRANSMIT state,
this means the transmitter has begun transmitting. The GNU
Radio package includes by default several building blocks for
signal and information processing. The programmer has the
the implementation of SDRs [8]. The development of the
software defined radar is done by representing the hardware
radar by a graph where the vertices represent the various
blocks and the edges represent the data flow between the
blocks.
A. Transmit signal processing block
A GNU Radio signal processing block accepts
arguments which specify the file that contains exactly one
pulse-repetition interval (PRI) of the radar waveform, the
number of times the data in this file should be transmitted and
the number of samples that the transmitter should wait before
transmitting anything [1],[6]. Upon instantiation, the
transmitter checks its state and responds accordingly. The
system simply counts samples and transmits nothing. Once the
requisite number of samples has been passed, it transmits the
synchronization signal after which the system transmits a
known signal.
option to custom design signal processing blocks according to
his/her specifications. Further details about signal processing
steps in SDR have been explained in [7].
In GNU Radio signal processing blocks are built
using a combination of Python code for high level abstraction,
GUI and other non performance-critical functions, while
performance critical signal processing blocks are written in
C++. Swig is used as an interface between C++ and Python.
These custom designed blocks can then be accessed from GRC
as any other default signal processing block with the help of
XML.
 Fig.6: Block diagram of software-defined radar in operational mode
The GNU Radio package includes by default several
building blocks for signal and information processing. Some
of the implemented blocks are FFT blocks, FIR, IIR and
Hilbert filters, automatic gain control blocks and various
modulation and demodulation blocks. Apart from these
signal processing blocks, various sink and source blocks
such as signal generators, noise generators, audio source
and sink and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) source and
sink are also pre-defined. The programmer has the option to
custom design signal processing blocks according to his/her
specifications.
The main signal processing blocks used in synthetic
aperture radar (SDR) are focusing, speckle filtering,
radiometric calibration and normalization. Doppler Centroid
estimation requires the autocorrelation function which is
coded in C++ and then run in Python using SWIG2 as the
interface. Range compression and azimuth compression are
done by performing FFT and inverse FFT on the received
data. As the FFT blocks are in-built in GNU Radio
software, the compression blocks can be implemented as a
graph. Speckle filtering is done so as to remove the random
statistical fluctuations associated with the radar reflectivity
of each pixel of the image. This is achieved by using
adaptive filters based on minimum square error or
maximum aposteriori (MAP). The received pulses are
classified using Support Vector Machine algorithm. This
algorithm should be insensitive to noise effects and any
small changes in the data. The data collected at one time
and location with a certain signal to noise ratio can be used
to classify pulses at another time and location with a
possibly differing SNR [5].
The radiometric calibration of the SAR image is done by
considering the radar equation law for corrections in the
scattering area (A), the antenna gain pattern (G2) and the
range spread loss (R3). Radiometric calibration can be
implemented in SDR by writing a C++ program. The
variations in the backscatter energy due to the radar look
angle and swath width are normalized by performing a
modified cosine correction.
VII. EXPERIMENTS
When the signal is received by the receiver antenna, it is
stored as a log file in GNU Radio, which is of type
gr_complex. This log file can be plotted with the help of the
folder MATPLOTLIB that is installed along with the GNU
radio software as it contains the necessary commands after
converting it into matrix or any other data format as
required. After the received signal is obtained, subsequent
signal processing is done and calibration techniques are
applied to get an idea of the information that has been
transmitted. The functions used for plotting are gr_plot_fft,
gr_plot_psd and gr_plot_iq to get the power spectral
density, fast fourier transform and in-phase and quadrature
phase components of the log file respectively.
The following experiment describes how an SDR can be
used effectively for plotting the data received by an SAR
and hence can be used for analysing the type of signal that
was transmitted. Fig 7 shows the typical experimental setup
with PC and USRP kit. For SAR, the antenna in the
experimental setup should be moved and since we use
USRP, the experimental setup can be moved more freely.
The connection between USRP and System can be
established by wireless means.
For this experiment, frequency of 2.5GHz is considered
to be suitable and hence RFX2400 (daughter board) is used
since it operates in the frequency range 2.25-2.9GHz. A
chirp signal of width 32MHz is transmitted with a pulse
repetition frequency (PRF) of 100Hz. The same experiment
can also be performed at different PRFs
Fig 7: Typical Experimental Setup
A Pulse period of 5 s and waveform amplitude of 15mv
was used. Initially the experiment is performed within a
small radius and using the USRP kit the signal received on
reflection from the object is stored as a log file in the
system. In the first case, reading was taken in a free
environment. In the second case, a human body is brought
into the test area and the subsequent readings are also taken
and stored. And finally a metal object was placed in the test
area and readings were taken. The plot for the first case and
third case is given in figure 8 and figure 9 respectively. The
x-axis and y-axis are sample number and amplitude
respectively for the I&Q plot.
These files are stored as .dat files and it is plotted with
the help of MATPLOTLIB files in GRC to get various plots
such as power spectral density, fast Fourier transform and
in-phase and quadrature phase components.

Fig.9: I&Q and FFT plot of the reflected signal from the metal surface.

From the Fig.8 and 9 we observe a change in the Q-

Fig.8 I&Q and FFT plot of the reflected signal in free space.
component. This change in the amplitude in Fig.9 helps to
estimate the presence of an object. The variation can be seen
distinctly in the FFT plots. In the similar fashion different
objects can be placed at some distance from the antenna in
the USRP kit and change in the amplitudes can be recorded.
The data collected in the above fashion acts as a database.
When this setup is used for the detection of target or
enemies in practical situations, the database will be of good
use.

VIII. COMPARISON WITH CONVENTIONAL RADAR

On comparing the proposed idea of implementing Radar
using SDR with the normal conventional Radar, the
following disparities were found and they are tabulated
below (Table 1).

S.No Properties Conventional Radar Radar using SDR

1. Effect of Amplifier Possibility of non-linearities in the output The problem of non-linearity does not arise
characteristics of the amplifier is high because amplification is done by scaling in a
software
2. Local oscillator The changes in frequency stability and This problem is avoided here completely. Signal
phase shift leads to spurious output signals generation is digitally done in PC.
in the output of the mixer
3. Waveform Adaptation The hardware design can be implemented The type of waveform can be changed as and
for only one type of waveform in particular when necessary.
4. Portability This type of radars are mostly suitable for Since we go in for implementation using USRP
static application. and PC, the experimental setup can be placed
anywhere and is mobile in nature.
5. Application The hardware radar is designed and It can be used for versatile applications by
deployed for a specific application modifying the software module.

6. Reconfigurability Configuration is one time On-the-fly configuration is possible

7. Upgradation cost High, due to cost incurred for replacing Drastically Low
several components.
Table 1: Comparison between Conventional Radars and Radars using SDR.

communications and computing needs and acting to meet those

IX. CONCLUSION needs. The additional blocks have the functions of sniffing
The use of software to synthesis radar leads one to ask the radar environment, providing for dynamic spectrum
whether cognitive radar can be constructed that is capable of management, and controlling the level of transmitted power.
sensing the surrounding wireless environment and user
However, considering that cognitive radio functions are
inherent to physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC)
layer operations, the resulting embedded cognition requires
a robust model and framework which is capability of operating
within the computing constraints available in current wireless
platforms. In addition, traditional machine learning techniques
require significant computational resources, which could limit
the utility of a cognitive radio. These challenges are to be
overcome.
In this paper, a novel approach to implement the synthetic
aperture radar using Software defined radio (SDR) concept has
been proposed. The blocks in an SAR are defined in the GNU
Radio software. The RF front end is implemented by using the
minimum hardware - USRP (Universal Software Radio
Peripheral). The digital data (received data) from the USRP is
sent to the host CPU, where it is processed to obtain the radar
image. By using software modules, more flexibility and
reconfigurability of the radar design can be obtained. The
testing and configuration analysis of the implemented
prototype is in progress. The research is expected to extend to a
pint of realizing cognitive radar

REFERENCES
[1] Lee K. Patton, A GNU Radio Based Software-Defined Radar,
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Background and Theory, ESA.
[3] Danilo Valerio, Open Source Software-Defined Radio: A survey on
GNU radio and its application, FTW Technical Report, August
2008.
[4] Matt Ettus, USRP Users and Developers Guide, Ettus Research
LLC.
[5] Gregory P. Noone, Radar Pulse Classification using Support Vector
Machines.
[6] B. P. Lathi, Signal Processing and Linear Systems, Berkeley-
Cambridge Press, 1998.
[7] Behrouz Farhang-Boroujeny, Signal Processing Techniques for
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[8] Eric Blossom, Gnu Radio: GnuRadioHardware,
http://www.comsec.com/.