Ziria: Wireless Programming for Hardware Dummies – Part 2

Software defined radios are a powerful tool for experimenting with wireless PHY and MAC layers. At the same time, they are a challenging programming environment, given tight timing constraints imposed. A student who wants to venture in this area of research needs to master computer architecture and hardware, as well as numerous algorithms for signal processing and communication. In this lecture we will talk about Ziria, a programming language and a compiler that we have recently developed to simplify this task. Ziria is a high-level language, specialized for PHY design, that delegates most of the burdensome hardware optimization to the compiler and allows us to keep the code design clean and simple. We will walk through various building blocks of Wifi PHY design and show how to implement them in Ziria. At the end of the talk you should be able to understand the signal processing foundations of WiFi as well as to quickly implement and deploy your own PHY using Ziria. Ziria compiler is open sourced so you will be able to download it and play with the code yourselves. It currently supports Sora SDR platform but could be easily adapted to other similar platforms.