StormWave: An Open-Source Portable SDR Platform for Over-the-Air Resilience Evaluation of Terrestrial and Aerial Communications

TL;DR

StormWave is an open-source portable SDR platform that enables realistic over-the-air interference testing for terrestrial and aerial wireless systems, supporting diverse waveforms and real-time spectrum visualization.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, open-source SDR platform for field-based interference evaluation, with real-time waveform switching and spectrum monitoring capabilities.

Findings

Waveform- and modulation-dependent interference effects observed in ground experiments.

Distance-dependent constellation distortion and symbol degradation in air-to-air experiments.

StormWave source code will be released for community use and further research.

Abstract

This paper presents \emph{StormWave}, an open-source, portable software-defined Radio Frequency (RF) interference generation and monitoring platform designed for realistic field-based evaluation of the resilience of wireless communication systems. StormWave enables seamless composition and runtime switching among a wide range of narrowband and wideband waveforms, while supporting multiple digital modulations, adaptive coding, and multi-radio orchestration with real-time spectrum visualization. We evaluate the effectiveness of StormWave through both outdoor ground and air-to-air (A2A) experiments. Ground experiments demonstrate clear waveform- and modulation-dependent interference effects under realistic propagation conditions, while A2A experiments reveal pronounced distance-dependent constellation distortion and access-symbol degradation under active interference. The StormWave source code will be released to the community, with the expectation that StormWave will be used as a flexible, extensible, and field-ready platform for systematically validating interference resilience of wireless systems under realistic operating conditions.