Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bellard.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 134 posts

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

#21

Post by xradionut »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #10
mtdev wrote: post #5

Neat, however, software for base station are not provided and interested companies can contact the site owner. Pretty cool that this is allegedly running on a software defined radio kit which can be had for only ~$2000 (a bargain).

Is there a reason that this Low-Cost software defined radio wouldn't work ($30)? http://www.amazon.com/Newsky-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-Defi...

Because you are comparing two different categories of radios. There is a big difference between a very cheap receiver and a high quality, wide bandwidth, customizable transceiver. A bad automobile analogy would be a Yugo vs Peterbilt.

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

#22

Post by RachelF »

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...

Yes, it is a big shame that this is not open source.

I wonder how much he plans on making from this?

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

#26

Post by pagejim »

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.

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

#27

Post by halvsjur »

sandGorgon wrote: post #3

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

I was curious if there already existed something like this for GNU Radio and found something called OpenLTE:

http://openlte.sourceforge.net/

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

#28

Post by jlouis »

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.

Had it been somebody else, I would have pondered on the truth of the claim. But Mr. Bellard... that is another thing entirely.

My guess is that he does have certain limitations, for instance the amount of connections he can manage and so on. But I do think modern hardware can be made to perform well if you know what you are doing. There are many ways to generally implement the DSPs on a modern PC that would be fast enough.

Also, a guess is that one of the reasons DSPs are preferred is that they have a better power profile. You don't need that for testing purposes.

All in all, I think it is a great project.

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

#29

Post by trigger »

nathell wrote: post #9

Fabrice Bellard is one of the guys I dream of one day achieving the level of productivity of.

Productivity and sheer balls. My on-the-side projects are pathetic compared to what this guy does. Even a quick glance at one of those LTE specs is enough to scare me a million miles away from a project like this.

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

#30

Post by mjwalshe »

mtdev wrote: post #5

Neat, however, software for base station are not provided and interested companies can contact the site owner. Pretty cool that this is allegedly running on a software defined radio kit which can be had for only ~$2000 (a bargain).

And I suspect that they wont sell this kit to civilains (subs) as you need to have a licence for those 4g bands - if your lucky there might be an exception for low power expeimental licences for bone fide reserchers but I would not hold my breath
Post reply on HN