Team 2

Team Members

Faculty Advisor

Matthew Silverman
Nicholas Wycoff
Spencer Albano

Shengli Zhou

Sponsor

UConn Electrical & Computer Engineering Department

sponsored by
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AFRL SDR University Challenge: Physical Layer Network Slicing

Throughout the course of our senior design project we have participated in a Software Defined Radio (SDR) university challenge hosted by the Wright Brothers Institute (WBI) and partnered with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). A total of 17 universities have participated with the key goals of the competition being to encourage hands-on skill building and explore experimentation through SDR hardware. Team UConn was one of the top 8 finalists to demonstrate and compete in person at WBI in Dayton, Ohio and received the award of most outstanding project. Judges of the competition were members of the AFRL, National Instruments, and other industries including Northrop Grumman and Collins Aerospace. For our project we plan on implementing network slicing with SDRs in context of local area networks. Our vision is to create an access point that can establish a network and communicate across both Wi-Fi (802.11) and Zigbee (802.15.4) devices. The LAN can be partitioned on both networking standards to separate communications between devices. An example of this would be a business that limits sensitive information and communications between departments. Network slicing typically occurs in layer 3 or higher of the OSI model but in our application, we incorporate network slicing on the physical layer (layer 1). Physical layer network slicing will be accomplished by using custom preambles that will be appended to the beginning of the Wi-Fi and Zigbee packets. The characteristics we strive for are high autocorrelation for detectability, and low cross-correlation so that each preamble is uniquely different from one another. There are some routers that can communicate over both Wi-Fi and Zigbee but are typically two separate devices bundled in the same enclosure. Having one device that communicates across both standards provides ease to a network administrator that can manage devices in both standards. Benefits include efficiency, flexibility, and security.