Programmable Metamaterial Antenna's For Physical Layer Security

Members: Dylan Turner, Prachi Patel

Faculty advisors:

PROJECT OVERVIEW

PROGRESS LOG

Week 1 (5/28 - 5/30)

• We began reading the research paper our project is based on, which details the fundamental aspects of our topic.
• We met with our mentor and began discussing topics in depth in regards to metamaterial antennas.
• We learned how to use Orbit and the command line arguments in order to connect to the node along with turning it on and off.

Week 2 (6/3 - 6/6)

• We learned the fundamentals of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).
• We watched an Introduction to Linux presentation.
• We downloaded GNU Radio on our local devices.
• We experimented with creating basic flow graphs.
• We completed a tutorial with our mentor involving Sandbox 2, transmitting and receiving OFDM signals from two Software Defined Radios (SDR).

Week 3 (6/10 - 6/13)

• We began looking into source code for the OFDM transmitter block that required modification.
• We learned how to output to file sink using GNURadio.
• We researched related topics as we came across them in the flow graph, such as Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) which is essentially an error correction tool.
• We viewed outputs for each individual block as Hex or Binary data.
• Wrote a script to convert the complex number in Single precision IEEE 752 format to decimal using python.
• We tried to visualize the output of the OFDM Carrier allocator, but ran into issues because we cannot use custom python blocks on mac due to a bug.
• We modified the saving script to accept a second set of vectors as input which will multiply the OFDM carrier allocation output.

Week 4 (6/17 - 6/20)

• Created custom python blocks to interact with OFDM Carrier Allocator Block:
  • Prints its output in a readable format.
  • Multiplies specified carriers by precoded vector.
• Studied the math that goes into Symbol Precoding.
• Began implementing these functions using Python so we can complete our system and begin testing.