New open source Viterbi decoder for openofdm

[Tobias-DG3YEV]

Hi,

I implemented a new fork of openofdm to make it fit into the RA-Sentinel project (1).

The most critical (and annoying) thing with openofdm for me was the need for the Xilinx/AMD Viterbi decoder license and its timeout after some months and also that it seemed to stop working after an hour or so. This is no longer an issue. I wrote a new, open source version that is plug-in compatible with the commercial one.[2]

In this fork the might be much more changes that you are willing to adopt into your code. So maybe you can create a branch for RA-Sentinel of you can only change the Viterbi part in your project.

The Viterbi has been fully tested. There is a simulation and verification bench available [2]. Also it has been run on real SDR hardware [1] on real world WiFi frames.

[1] https://github.com/Tobias-DG3YEV/RA-Sentinel
[2] https://github.com/Tobias-DG3YEV/openViterbi/

Best regards
Tobias

[f0rtis-net]

very nice upd! waiting for maintainers...

[kylex2]

To me it looks like master branch isn't maintained anymore and that development is happening in the dot11zynq branch. The idea of replacing the proprietary viterbi core is great. However I do see an issue with this pull request that you are adding files licensed under GPLv3 to a project licensed under Apache 2.0. I suspect it will/can't be accepted unless you re-license that code to match this project. It actually looks like at least some of the files were modified with a new header which removes the original author and changes the license and I'm not sure that is ok. At the very least it's not polite to replace the original author with only your own name. These kind of headers are added to files you only modify and not entirely created by yourself.

[Tobias-DG3YEV]

Sorry there was some misunderstanding internally. Some older headers contained Mohamed as the author which was not correct as he got the source code from me first. He was very helpful in bug fixing and testing this code and added file headers with himself as the author because there was no header at all first. I updated/added headers to all the files to clarify this. I also changed the license to Apache 2.0 so it is now usable for dot11.

[Szum123321]

Have you actually changed the decoder in the ofdm_decoder.v ? It seems to still use viterbi_v7_0, not Viterbi_decoder.

[kylex2]

@Tobias-DG3YEV, Thank you for your reply. I think you need to update this pull-request too. There are some changes in this PR which adds headers and switches the license to GPLv3. For example verilog/bits_to_bytes.v

It would also be nice if there was less signal/port renaming. It would make it easier to follow the actual changes.