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A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

bellard.org

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Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#31

Post by guard-of-terra »

swalsh wrote: post #25

This is cool, but I would assume he's violating any number of patents in order for it to work properly. (perhaps that's why it's closed source?)

I don't think it's the main reason. If he really wanted to open source it he could do it anyway. What can the respective patent holders do? "Bring it on", get bad press, no money (assuming he doesn't make any off this) and Streisand effect.

Assuming he does want to make money off this, it makes sense to hold source (or indeed the whole prototype) closed for many reasons.

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#36

Post by blinkingled »

willvarfar wrote: post #4

Very neat. Shame that 'interested companies can contact me'. Would be fun to know how such base-stations - when attached to antenna - can be used to spoof things and perform attacks. Lets hope that comes up at some blackhat conference soon...

I would not be surprised if his intent is to first make money on his insanely hard and smart work and then make it open source later on. I think he has done something similar with another project of his - I just don't recall which one.

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#37

Post by laclac »

pagejim wrote: post #26

Wonder how RealTime it is? Encoding/Decoding of data/signal as per LTE specs is a multi-step process with lots of maths intensive operations. Normally, custom made Baseband DSP processors are used for this kind of stuff which contain special HW Accelerators for this kind of intensive computing. Would be really interesting to see how he has implemented it and how practical is it.

It uses a USRP N210 (https://www.ettus.com/product/details/UN210-KIT) which has an FPGA that is most likely used for the signal processing. However, quite a lot can be done on a standard PC these days with SSE or GPGPU programming.

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#39

Post by tonfa »

blinkingled wrote: post #36
willvarfar wrote: post #4

Very neat. Shame that 'interested companies can contact me'. Would be fun to know how such base-stations - when attached to antenna - can be used to spoof things and perform attacks. Lets hope that comes up at some blackhat conference soon...

I would not be surprised if his intent is to first make money on his insanely hard and smart work and then make it open source later on. I think he has done something similar with another project of his - I just don't recall which one.

kqemu was originally closed source. Not sure why it was open sourced, competitive advantage went away?

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#40

Post by atopuzov »

heretohelp wrote: post #7
sandGorgon wrote: post #3

I wonder why this was not developed/contributed to the GNU Radio toolkit ( http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki ) .

Because it's Fabrice Bellard. Look at his ouerve, he doesn't bother integrating any of his projects into anything else, or put more charitably, dance to the politics of other peoples' projects. I don't blame him. Contributing to GNU projects as an outsider is a PITA.

> Contributing to GNU projects as an outsider is a PITA.

Finally someone who has the guts to write this!!! So true, so true ...

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