MIGOU "Hybrid Radio" Combines the Best of SDR and Hardware Radio for IoT Experimentation
Designed to combine the best of high-power software defined radio and low-power hardware communications, MIGOU is impressive.
A research group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid has unveiled a low-power platform for edge computing and cognitive radio experimentation — combining software-defined radio capabilities with energy-efficiency hardware radios to create the best of both worlds.
"I'm the main developer of the MIGOU platform. This platform uses the Microchip AT86RF215 transceiver (like TinySDR and iotSDR) and a Microchip SmartFusion2 flash-based FPGA SoC," lead developer Ramiro Utrilla Gutiérrez writes in a submission to RTL-SDR.com. The particularity of our work is what we have called the hybrid radio approach, which proposes to provide low-resource devices with the ability to operate both as a current mote, using a hardware transceiver, and as an SDR system."
"This is possible using only the AT86RF215 transceiver. With these capabilities, hybrid radio end-devices can exploit the SDR hardware flexibility for those sporadic tasks that strictly require it, and still benefit from the energy efficiency of hardware transceivers for all other tasks."
"The power consumption of our platform was measured in transmit, receive, and sleep modes," the research team explains. "These measurements were compared with the corresponding ones of other representative tools and systems: YetiMote, a traditional IoT end-device; MarmotE SDR, a low-power SDR system; and B200mini and B210 USRPs, two widely used high-performance SDR platforms. Moreover, all these devices were compared in terms of their hardware features."
"The results obtained confirmed that a state-of-the-art tradeoff between hardware flexibility and energy efficiency was achieved. These features will allow researchers to develop appropriate solutions to current end-devices’ challenges, and to test and evaluate them in real scenarios."
The team has no plans to release the MIGOU as a commercial product, but is instead making it available as an open hardware project. Full details, including test results, schematics, bill of materials, and manufacturing files, are available on the project website.