White RHINO: A low cost whitespace communications and radar hardware platform

This paper describes a hardware platform aimed at the recently defined White Space Radio spectrum, but, furthermore, to describe how this hardware can also form the basis of a commensal radar system using the emissions of the Whitespace communication system. We envisage White Space communication systems being established in sparsely populated areas to provide communications. This communication network of nodes can be used as nodes of a multistatic network of Radars to track moving targets (especially aerial). The radar system is commensal in that it has no impact on the design and operation of the communications system. The choice of Whitespace spectrum has many advantages. First of all, it will give access to a wide bandwidth, which in turn means better resolution for the commensal radar system. Secondly, the standardization process for Whitespace communication is over. And lastly, this will be a communication system of choice for sparsely populated areas, which are also sites suitable for Radar surveillance. The UHF frequencies of White Space Radio have excellent propagation properties, including foliage penetration. Our development of hardware is because of a dearth of low cost hardware platforms, which are specifically tailored for such a purpose. The proposed platform, named White RHINO (Whitespace Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for ComputiNg and RadiO), envisages to bridge the gap and provide innovators a cost-effective, reliable as well as efficient platform to develop novel solutions for shared spectrum Networked Radar.