Software-Defined Radio

[VelMurugan]

Software-Defined Radio

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) Forum defines SDR technology as "radios that provide software control of a variety of modulation techniques, wide-band or narrow-band operation, communications security functions (such as hopping), and waveform requirements of current & evolving standards over a broad frequency range."In a nutshell, Software-Defined Radio (SDR) refers to the technology wherein software modules running on a generic hardware platform consisting of DSPs and general purpose microprocessors are used to implement radio functions such as generation of transmitted signal (modulation) at transmitter and tuning/detection of received radio signal (demodulation) at receiver.Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is a rapidly evolving technology that is receiving enormous recognition and generating widespread interest in the telecommunication industry.

Over the last few years, analog radio systems are being replaced by digital radio systems for various radio applications in military, civilian and commercial spaces. In addition to this, programmable hardware modules are increasingly being used in digital radio systems at different functional levels. SDR technology aims to take advantage of these programmable hardware modules to build an open-architecture based radio system software.

SDR technology facilitates implementation of some of the functional modules in a radio system such as modulation/demodulation, signal generation, coding and link-layer protocols in software.SDR technology can be used to implement military, commercial and civilian radio applications. A wide range of radio applications like Bluetooth, WLAN, GPS, Radar, WCDMA, GPRS, etc. can be implemented using SDR technology. This whitepaper provides an overview of generic SDR features and its architecture with a special focus on the benefits it offers in commercial wireless communication domain.