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

StormWave, developed by Yuqing Cui and 11 other researchers, is an open-source portable SDR platform designed to evaluate the resilience of wireless communication systems against realistic interference. It enables seamless composition and runtime switching among narrowband and wideband waveforms, while supporting multiple digital modulations, adaptive coding, and multi-radio orchestration with real-time spectrum visualization. The platform is field-ready and intended for both terrestrial and aerial communications, filling a gap in practical over-the-air testing tools. Its open-source nature allows the community to extend and adapt it for various scenarios.

The team validated StormWave through outdoor ground experiments and air-to-air (A2A) experiments using drones. Ground tests showed clear waveform- and modulation-dependent interference effects under realistic propagation conditions. A2A experiments revealed pronounced distance-dependent constellation distortion and access-symbol degradation under active interference, demonstrating the platform's utility for assessing drone communication links. By releasing the source code, the researchers aim to provide a flexible, extensible tool for systematically validating interference resilience in wireless systems, which is critical for both commercial telecom and autonomous aerial operations.