Software Defined Radio for Broadband OFDM Protocols

We describe new concepts in broadband software define radio architectures optimized for very high bandwidth wireless communication protocols. This is important since a trend in wireless communication transceivers is the adoption of increasingly sophisticated radio link algorithms which maximize utility functions consisting of network capacity, data rate reliability, and throughput. Many prior efforts in software defined radio suffer from either a presumption that sufficiently high clock rates exist to employ traditional single instruction multiple data (SIMD) multi-processor architectures or that renaissance programmers are available to convert thousand page wireless protocol specifications into fine-grain data flow graphs at the operation level. The challenge for new generations of software defined radio is to maintain flexibility whiles simultaneously supporting computationally efficient broadband communication algorithms and ease of programming. Our system architecture is viable for wide varieties of communication protocols and physical data channels. We focus principally on OFDM transceiver styles due to their bandwidth scalability and their popularity in many next generation wireless air interfaces. Our SDR system jointly minimizes power, maximize algorithm flexibility, and to enable rapid software re-programming. We feel that these concepts are critical for the adoption of software defined radio in 21st century broadband wireless networks.