The RHINO platform: charging towards innovation and skills development in software defined radio.

This paper presents a pilot study on the development of a reconfigurable computing platform for use in prototyping Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications and building technical knowledge in this specialist area. SDR is becoming an increasingly popular approach for building experimental radio and radar systems, giving researchers significant flexibility in choosing bandwidths, modulation and other operational parameters traditionally fixed by front-end hardware. The SDR approach involves constructing and testing radio applications on reusable platforms, thereby reducing costs and time spent changing physical layer hardware. This paper discusses use of the Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for comptiNg and radiO (RHINO) platform as a hardware platform for novice engineers to develop SDR skills and to prototype radio systems.