Sora Wiki

Welcome to the Microsoft Sora Wiki!
Sora Wiki is an interactive wiki about the Microsoft Sora research project. This format allows for any university to contribute information for easier communication and development of Sora-related research.

Ideally, this will allow for any bottlenecks in the initial phases of the Sora project to be collaberated on jointly, and thus allowing all teams to reach their end goals with initial assistence from other universities, while still operating independantly on their final results.

Microsoft SORA
Microsoft SORA is a SOftware-developed RAdio (SDR) that allows for the usual complexities of communication that occur with regards to radios to instead be expressed in software, written by acedemic developers using the Microsoft Sora SDK, currently publically available.

It can be considered as a competitor to existing SDR's, such as GNURadio, but offers a PCIe-x8 based radio-control board (RCB) that possesses capabilities (such as low latency) that no other existing commodity-PC based SDR can compete with.

All featured code was written in C, with some Assembler thrown in for more intensive purposes.

This product features heavy use of radios, coding, and the OSI Networking Model.

System Requirements
System requirements to run the Sora radio-control board (and thus all resulting applications) are as follows:


 * Windows XP SP2 (Windows 7 support is expected in a future release)
 * Intel i7 "Nehalem" Quad-Core processor or equivalent (Core 2 is supposedly possible)
 * At least 1GB of RAM (This is potentially very resource-intensive, more RAM is recommended)
 * PCIe-x8 or x16 for the Radio-Control Board (Supposedly graphics card conflicts have occurred in the past)
 * WARP or USRP radio front-ends. (More formats are a possibility in the future)

It should be noted that two separate drivers run when Sora is in use: a upper-level SDR Application Driver, and a lower-level RCB driver (for controlling the physical aspects of the Sora RCB).

Recent Updates:
Our team at the U of M has been hard at work trying to understand how to program using the SoraSDK and the libraries associated with it. We are happily able to report success at adding in functionality to the Sora 802.11b source sample code posted on the Microsoft page - our implementation includes RTS, CTS, and a Backoff timer. It should be noted that this is not perfectly implemented - something within the RTS physical cache is slightly broken that can cause a STOP error (bluescreen). But this is sporadic at best.

Our package can be installed just like the Sora 802.11b source sample code, but we'd recommend uninstalling that code first.

It can be found at:

http://cid-0c55f9bb8697aa22.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Documents/802.11b%20RTS%20CTS%20Installer.exe

Please email me with any concerns or findings you have with it, at cgordini@umich.edu. If you have any additional debugging ideas, I'd love to hear them.