GNU radio based digital beamforming system: BER and computational performance analysis

The rapid growth in computational capacity of general purpose processors (GPPs) has allowed for an alternative to traditional implementation of digital signal processing systems. Signal processing algorithms that were once implemented in dedicated field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and embedded digital signal processors are now being increasingly implemented using softwares. This paper presents the development of a GPP based digital beamforming system using GNU Radio - an Open Source software development platform for signal processing applications to be used with software defined radio systems. The developed beamforming system is based on minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) algorithm. We study the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the beamforming system. We provide the experimental BER results to highlight the signal recovery capabilities of the beamformer. This paper also addresses the challenges of real-time implementation and analyses the computational complexity of the GPP based digital beamforming system.