The goal of ChARM Mander is to intelligently optimize the wireless spectrum usage, avoiding interference and exploiting the available unused bandwidth. Specifically, ChARM Mander is an AI-enabled driver for a modified version of srsRAN [1]. srsRAN is a 3GPP protocol stack, implementing a 3GPP mobile base station. The modified version [1] adds to the base station the API for cell frequency change and user handovering. Please, refer to [3] for an in-depth description of its internals and working.
ChARM Mander is made up of two components:
- hop_collector.py: it connects to a Software Defined Radio (SDR) to collect I/Q sample on four (configurable) frequencies; it later sends the four streams to four different TCP/IP sockets.
- charm_mander.py: it reads from the TCP/IP ports the four collected streams, and it runs the ChARM machine learning classifier [2]. ChARM Mander implements a policy to avoid interference and exploit unused channels, and it drives the srsRAN base station accordingly (e.g., changing the base station operating frequencies if an interference with a WiFi device is detected).
To start the I/Q sample collection:
./hop_collector.py
To start the smart reacting base station:
nc -l -p 8000 | ./srsenb <conf args>
/charm_mander.py | nc 127.0.0.1 8000
ChARM Mander stems from a research project at the Northeastern University [1], if you use this code, please cite our work:
@inproceedings{Baldesi2022Charm,
author = {Baldesi, Luca and Restuccia, Francesco and Melodia, Tommaso},
booktitle = {{IEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications}},
title = {{ChARM: NextG Spectrum Sharing Through Data-Driven Real-Time O-RAN Dynamic Control}},
year = {2022},
month = may
}
ChARM Mander has been released with a dataset for training, validation, and testing [4]. The dataset was collected using Xilinx and USRP SDRs running the OpenWiFi and srsRAN software stacks.
- https://github.com/lucabaldesi/srsRAN/tree/charm_api
- https://github.com/lucabaldesi/charm_trainer
- L. Baldesi, F. Restuccia and T. Melodia. "ChARM: NextG Spectrum Sharing Through Data-Driven Real-Time O-RAN Dynamic Control", IEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, May 2022.
- http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20423481