RELIA
In 2022, NSF granted the University of Washington, in collaboration with LabsLand, the project RELIA: A New Generation of Broadly Accessible Remote Engineering Laboratories.
The development of technologies designed for the virtualization of signal and information
processing experimentation has been persistently constrained by cost-associated hardware
limitations, the inability to scale for larger audiences, and the lack of a flexible framework which
supports user-specific interaction.
Given recent advances in cloud computing, we introduce an adaptable, open-source system harnessing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and software-defined radio (SDR) platforms to streamline the process of analyzing communication patterns between various individual transmitter-receiver pairs. A real-time user environment designed to complement the GNU Radio toolkit is demonstrated with minimal signal interference, enabling remotely-controlled, real information transfer. User-defined configuration files are processed through various Firejail-secured runner engines and dynamically visualized with adjustable feedback and interaction.
By integrating novel images into the ADALM-PLUTO vanilla architecture, improved processed signal resolution was accomplished, with additional potential for ARM processor or FPGA reprogramming.
The findings of this project are targeted toward individuals of all communities, including those with insufficient access to requisite hardware. To remedy such issues, the integrated environment has been adopted and is currently accessible through LabsLand, a partner in this research, and its network of affiliated universities and institutions.
Individual contributions to the constructed system are highly distributable courtesy of the modular nature of the provided framework, encouraging collaboration and sharing of physical resources. Existing functionalities of LabsLand, including learning management systems, are anticipated to further contribute towards the fostering of a complete, visual environment for users, replicating the actual experience of end users in standard, on-site hardware experimentation without associated localized issues
More information is coming soon. In the meantime, find further information at the NSF website: