RemoteRF: An Open-Source Platform to Democratize Access to Software-Defined Radios in Wireless Research and Education

Software-defined radios (SDRs) are powerful tools for research and education in wireless communications, but their cost and complexity put them out of reach for many universities and researchers worldwide. To address this, we introduce RemoteRF, a platform for creating large-scale testbeds of distributed SDRs that are centrally managed by a single server. These SDRs can be remotely accessed by users over the internet, allowing them to conduct wireless experiments at any time from virtually anywhere, as long as they have a network connection. When used in research, RemoteRF can be used to develop and experimentally evaluate new communication techniques or to collect real-world data to train and test machine learning models. When used in education, RemoteRF can allow students in virtually any sized class to share a handful of SDRs to complete active learning lab exercises that parallel course lectures. In an effort to democratize access to SDRs across the globe, the software powering RemoteRF has been made open-source and is extensively documented, allowing anyone to deploy their own instance today in a matter of minutes. Over the past year or so, RemoteRF has been used in both teaching and research at UCLA, where it has logged nearly 4,000 hours of use by more than 200 students and researchers to date.