GNUradio and 802.11: performance evaluation and limitations

In the last few years, software defined radio has become a widespread tool for research and development in the wireless arena. One of the drivers of this success is GnuRadio, an open source collection of signal processing routines, together with the inception of commercially available software radio front-ends to complete the signal chain. A number of wireless protocols have been developed on top of Gnu- Radio, including the ubiquitous 802.11 standard. In this article, we focus on the use and performance evaluation of the 802.11 BBN software-based transmitter and receiver implementation, highlighting its capabilities and limitations. In order to achieve this, we analyze the BER and packet error rate measurements on a reference scenario.