A review on essentials and technical challenges of Software Defined Radio

Since the initiation of, Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program, the concept of Software Define Radio (SDR) has received considerable attention and significant progresses have been made. While raison d'etre of SDR is somehow different for military and commercial applications, they both share similar challenges towards implementation of a true SDR. A true SDR is facing numerous hardware and software challenges, many of them are still to be addressed by undergoing research. There are several publications and references concerning software architecture and requirements of a SDR, and the technology requirements are tend to be sidelined. This is mainly because of the fact that in the JTRS program, the focus is on voice and low data rate applications; also the frequency band is limited to UHF. On the other hand, the cost of the implementation is less of a concern for now. However, by emerging of advance warfare technology where it is required to transport more bits per warrior to accommodate video and telemetry data, and also by introducing initiatives similar to the JTRS to other communication systems, such as satellite and high-capacity tactical links, technology requirements of SDR have to be revisited. In this paper the focus is on the hardware technology aspect of the SDR. The main technical objective of a SDR is a, versatile reconfigurable platform, which provides interoperability. The main blocks of a true SDR are namely: intelligent antenna, programmable RF modules, high-performance Digital-to-Analog (DAC) and Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC), Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques/technology and the interconnect technology.