Software radio -: An alternative for the future in wireless personal and multimedia communications

Software radio has gained such a lot interest over the past few years that it has been recognized to be a credible option for current and future radio systems. It has been aggressively addressed also in academic research laboratories around the world. In the commercial sector software radio provides a future-proof platform which can be used to implement current second generation cellular systems as well as evolving third generation systems with their possible new features and services. Software radio development aims at wideband RF access and software partitioning for plug-and-play type of use. The development is facilitated by progress in silicon capabilities, signal processing power of new and future processors and reconfiguration methods (software download, smart cards, etc.). However, there are still a lot of problems in implementing the software radio. These problems include high quality wideband RF access and high performance analog to digital and digital to analog conversion due to extreme demands placed upon them. Due to lack of suitable methods for performance evaluation it is also difficult to estimate the signal processing requirement for a software radio when implementing several systems in the same platform. Then are also no methods for estimating the processing capacity of a software radio platform consisting of multiple DSP processors, CPUs, memory modules and low speed/high speed busses. On top of this there are no universal design tools that could be used all the way from system level specification to actual implementation but instead different CAD-tools with different kind of options must be used in the design process. Due to finite processing capacity novel and computationally efficient DSP-architectures must be defined for critical functions to optimize the designs. This includes identification of common functionalities. These topics will addressed in the paper.