Video Streaming: a Gnu Radio Solution

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Video Streaming: A GNU Radio Solution

Carmelo Sferrazza, Alessandreo Negrini, Andrea Gulino, Marco Gavelli, and Erwu Liu

 Abstract— GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit to implement software radios. It is widely used in hobbyist, academic and commercial environments to support wireless communications research as well as to implement real-world radio systems. With GNU Radio, this paper demonstrates a pure software implementation of video streaming. The connection to external software for in-the-loop testing is also presented and validated. Index Terms—GNU Radio, software defined radio, video streaming

I. INTRODUCTION

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NU RADIO [1] is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is an open-source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios. GNU Radio applications are primarily written in Python. For performance-critical processing, GNU Radio also provides a GUI to create a flow graph using blocks written in C++. While GNU Radio is typically used with external hardware such as USRP to create software-defined radios, this study is to demonstrate a pure software implementation of video streaming over GNU Radio. The software will read a video file from hard disk or from webcam, compress and modulate the data, add noise to simulate noisy transmission, and finally send it over the network (LAN, WLAN, or the Internet). For this, we use the following blocks [2] of GNU Radio: • TCP Source: It receives data from a TCP socket. In the client mode, it attempts to connect to a server at the given address and port. In the server mode, it binds a socket to the given address and port and accept the first client. • TCP Sink: It writes data to a TCP socket. In the client mode, it attempts to connect to a server at the given address and port. In the server mode, it binds a socket to the given address and port and accept the first client. • Packet Encoder: It prepares data for...