Software Defined Radio is a communication system where major parts of the sig-nal processing are done with the help of software compare to the application specific hardware. This kind of system consists of computer, a radio frequency front end and Analog-to-Digital Converter and Digital-to-Analog Converter. Software Defined Radio modifies new protocols which are flexible and quick to deploy [1].

The ComNet department at Aalto University is exploring the feasibility of using Software Defined Radio for sensor and cognitive networks. The aim is to develop a flexible platform for verifying the customized MAC and PHY layer protocols and algorithms.

The aim of this project is to integrate the SDR nodes into our wireless sensor network test-bed that uses Sensinode [2] sensor nodes. Our SDR nodes are comprised of USRP2 hardware [3] and GNU radio [4] software. The Sensinode nodes are IEEE 802.15.4 compliant and use CC2420/CC2431 [5] transceiver. Provided the SDR nodes can be integrated into the sensor network without any loss of performance, it will give us the opportunity to enhance the functionality of the net-work by integration of new PHY layer algorithms and techniques such as interference cancellation [6], network cooperation and spectrum sensing for interference avoidance.

This thesis focuses on understanding the Software Defined Radio components (GNU Radio and USRP2), architecture of the operating system, signal processing blocks, creating the desired application-specific scenarios, installation and configuration of the SDR in Linux environment, integration of IEEE 802.15.4 stan-dard into SDR, and configuring the SDR to enable communication with existing sensor networks platform.

A Software Defined Radio running IEEE 802.15.4 was configured as a receiver and it received IEEE 802.15.4 packets from an existing sensor platform. The task was successfully completed and detailed report is in results.