EXPERIENCES FROM THE OSSIE PROJECT

This article briefly describes OSSIE, a university-based open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) project based on the US Department of Defense's Software Communications Architecture (SCA). The OSSIE software has proven useful for rapid prototyping by industry as well as for published research and education of hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students and short course participants. In addition to examples of OSSIE's successes, the project's challenges and approaches to mitigating and overcoming them are described. SDR is a flexible approach to radio design that allows a radio to support new communications standards by changing the radio's software. The OSSIE project, based at Virginia Tech, provides open source SDR software based on the SCA. OSSIE benefits from use of other open source software. OSSIE runs in Linux and has been ported to embedded platforms such as an OMAP starter kit.