Sora SDK 1.7 Manual

The Sora manual provides reference documentation for Microsoft Research Software Radio, also known as Sora, which is a research project initiated in the Wireless and Networking Group (WNG) at Microsoft Research Asia. Sora is a high-performance fully programmable software radio based on general purpose processors (i.e., CPU) in commodity PC architecture. Sora contains both hardware and software components. The hardware component is a high-speed, low latency Radio Control Board (RCB) that interconnects the RF frontend and the PC memory. RCB is based on PCI-Express interface and is capable of transferring large amounts of digital samples in high speed. All these digital samples are processed by software running on the host CPU. The software component is an SDK, containing critical drivers and libraries for programming and running highly-efficient baseband in real-time on modern multi-core PCs.

The first Sora SDK (Microsoft Research Software Radio Academic Kit), version 1.02, was released to academia in June 2010. An update, version 1.1, was released in November 2010. Sora version 1.5 was released in Sept 2011. Sora version 1.6 was released in Mar 2012. Sora version 1.7 was released in Oct 2012. This document contains updated information for the latest Sora release.