Grant date: September 2021
Amount: $69,053

This grant will allow UCLA researchers to demonstrate how to use off-the-shelf amateur radios to access and control commodity NB- IoT (i.e., narrow-band IoT) devices. Their solution–Flora-NB–is a software-based solution that leverages widely available software radios, such as GNU Radio, and does not require any modification or upgrade of the amateur radios.

The design extends the Flexible Mobile Network Platform (Flora), which is a flexible, software-defined, 4G LTE/5G system that does not use SIM cards, communication chipsets, or dedicated infrastructure equipment. The resulting solution, FLORA-NB, enables software base stations, i.e. eNodeB in NB-IoT terminology, and cellular cores, i.e. EPC in NB-IoT, to interact with commodity NB-IoT devices. Flora-NB will be an open-source, standard-compliant NB-IoT implementation that developers can program and use without modifying or upgrading hardware.