Student Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology or similar (f/m/x)

In the last few years the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has arisen in communications: a massive number of devices need to communicate via a wireless medium to deliver (sporadically) small data units to a common gateway. At DLR, new waveforms with advanced random-access schemes, strong error-correcting codes and multi-user detection techniques have been designed, analyzed and tested mainly through simulations. Since in the past decades general purpose computers have made huge leaps in both computing power and memory size, thus implementing radio communication blocks in software (CPU/GPU), has become an attractive solution for going beyond simulations and move towards prototyping computationally intensive signal processing algorithms.

The internship’s purpose is to design and implement digital signal processing blocks on a software defined radio (SDR) framework. In particular, the focus lies on adapting, simulating and implementing existing receiver algorithms (or design new ones) for packet detection, timing acquisition and frequency recovery under various performance constraints. In particularly LEO channel experiencing high Doppler shift and low SNR. The internship offers a valuable opportunity to get a deep understanding about the interplay of computer science and communications engineering by studying an existing SDR framework employed in a live setup with real radio frontends.