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White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform
Includes bibliographical references
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Department of Electrical Engineering
2014
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| _version_ | 1867614300196044800 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Hazarika, Ojonav |
| author2 | Mishra, Amit |
| author_browse | Hazarika, Ojonav Mishra, Amit |
| author_facet | Mishra, Amit Hazarika, Ojonav |
| author_sort | Hazarika, Ojonav |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Includes bibliographical references |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/9086 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:49:51.050Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publishDateRange | 2014 |
| publishDateSort | 2014 |
| publisher | Department of Electrical Engineering |
| publisherStr | Department of Electrical Engineering |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/9086 White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform Hazarika, Ojonav Mishra, Amit Includes bibliographical references The Electromagnetic spectrum has always been a very expensive resource and hence, has not been accessible to everyone. Yet, it is under-utilized. The new Whitespace Technology standards provide an efficient way to use the spectrum. However, the concept of shared spectrum introduced by the Whitespace Technology promises to reduce the cost of accessing the spectrum by a huge margin. Also, because the standards utilize the television channels, the VHF and UHF frequencies facilitate wireless transmission over large distances. This has provided impetus to various application developers. Using Whitespace Technology for Communications Radar is one such novel application which has great benefits for the African scenario. Here, the population is scattered and infrastructure for navigation and tracking is inadequate. But, there is a shortage of low-cost commercially available hardware platforms tailored for the application. In order to boost Whitespace-based Communications Radar application development, the White RHINO(Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for computation and radio) hardware platform was developed. It aims to fill the gap of low-cost commercial hardware platforms available for Whitespace-based Communications Radar. Being a Communications Radar platform, the White RHINO had to be designed keeping the standards and regulating body norms as yardsticks. However, an achievable radar performance of the platform under various scenarios was also estimated. The White RHINO contains an FPGA (the Zynq7000 series) which has dual embedded ARM processing cores. For the wireless interface, it contains a field programmable RF transceiver and an RF frontend section. The platform contains wired networking capability of 2 Gbps. The platform also has 512 MB DDR3 and 128 Mbit NAND ash as onboard memory. Finally, it has USB host, SDIO and JTAG for programmability and temperature sensors for system monitoring. The manufactured boards were tested under lab environment. It was found that except a failure on the RF transceiver section (due to a PCB footprint error), other interfaces were functional. The White RHINO successfully runs both U-Boot and Linux as operating systems. The error and other minor bugs have been corrected for the next fabrication run. Also, the cost of the complete White RHINO system is less than 1000 USD which makes it a very powerful platform and yet, less expensive than most of the commercially available platforms designed for similar applications. 2014-11-05T03:35:31Z 2014-11-05T03:35:31Z 2014 Master Thesis Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9086 eng application/pdf Department of Electrical Engineering Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | Hazarika, Ojonav White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform |
| title_full | White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform |
| title_fullStr | White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform |
| title_full_unstemmed | White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform |
| title_short | White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform |
| title_sort | white rhino a low cost communications radar hardware platform |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9086 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT hazarikaojonav whiterhinoalowcostcommunicationsradarhardwareplatform |