Software Defined Radio

Software Defined Radios – Concept

• • The basic concept of the SDR software radio
is that the radio can be totally configured or
defined by the software so that a common
platform can be used across a number of areas
•
• There is also the possibility that it can then be
re-configured as upgrades to standards arrive,
or if it is required to meet another role, or if
the scope of its operation is changed. what
Software is….
• what Software is….
• • Software, is that part of a computer system
that consists of encoded information or
computer instructions, in contrast to the physical
hardware from which the system is built.
• What Radio is…
• • Radio is the technology of using radio waves to
carry information, such as sound, by
systematically modulating some property of
electromagnetic energy waves transmitted
through space, such as their amplitude,
frequency, phase, or pulse width.
 When radio meets software
• Data communication networks plays a vital role in any
modern society. •
• They are used in numerous applications, including
financial transactions, social interactions, education,
national security, and commerce.
• • With the exponential growth in the ways and means
by which people need to communicate - data
communications, voice communications, video
communications, broadcast messaging, command and
control communications, emergency response
communications, etc.
• • Modifying radio devices easily and cost-effectively has
become business.
 Why Software Meets Radio?
• There are certain crucial drawbacks with pure
radio systems.
• • Least Flexibility
• • Design Cost is High
• • Possibility of Updating to new technologies is
difficult.
• • These Drawbacks are addressed by incorporating
Software along with the Hardware Radios
 What Is Software-Defined Radio?
• • A number of definitions can be found to
describe Software Defined Radio, also known
as Software Radio or SDR.
• The SDR Forum, working in collaboration with
the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers (IEEE) P1900.1 group, has worked to
establish a definition of SDR that provides
consistency and a clear overview of the
technology and its associated benefits.
 What Is Software-Defined Radio?
• • • “The Radio in which some or all of the physical
layer functions are software defined”
• • It is a radio system where the majority of
baseband processing (Physical Layer Functions)
are done in software which includes modulation,
forward error correction, spreading, filtering,
frequency, timing synchronization, and so on.
Digital Radio
• five sections:
• The antenna section, which receives (or transmits)
information encoded in radio waves.
• The RF front-end section, which is responsible for
transmitting/receiving radio frequency signals from
the antenna and converting them to an
Intermediate frequency (IF).
• The ADC/DAC section, which performs analog-to-
digital/digital-to-analog conversion. •
• The digital up-conversion (DUC) and digital down-
conversion (DDC) blocks, which essentially perform
modulations of the signal on the transmitting path
and demodulation of the signal on the receiving
path.
The baseband section, which performs operations such as
connection setup, equalization, frequency hopping,
coding/decoding, and correlation, while also implementing
the link layer protocol.

• The DDC/DUC and baseband processing operations

require large computing power, and in a conventional digital
radio are implemented in dedicated hardware.

• Software-defined radio refers to technologies wherein

these functionalities are performed by software modules
running on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), digital
signal processors (DSP), general-purpose processors (GPP),
or a combination there of.
•
• This enables programmability of both DDC/DUC
and baseband processing blocks.

• SDR is currently used to build radios that support

multiple interface technologies (e.g., CDMA, GSM,
and WiFi) with a single modem by reconfiguring it in
software.

• SDR is currently used mostly in military

applications, where cost is less of a constraint.
• EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE-DEFINED RADIO •
Two decades ago most radios had no software
at all, and those that had it didn’t do much with
it. In a remarkably visionary article published in
1993, Joseph Mitola III envisioned a very
different kind of radio. • A digital radio that
could be reconfigured in fundamental ways just
by changing the software code running on it. •
He dubbed this software-defined radio.
 A few years later Mitola’s vision started to become
reality. In the mid-1990s military radio systems were
invented in which software controlled most of the
signal processing digitally, enabling one set of
hardware to work on many different frequencies and
communication protocols.
• The first (known) example of this type of radio was the
• U.S. military’s SPEAKeasy I (not easily portable) &
• SPEAKeasy II radios, which allowed units from different
branches of armed forces to communicate for the first
time.
• SPEAKeasy II was a much more compact radio, the size
of two stacked pizza boxes, and was the first SDR with
sufficient DSP resources to handle many different kinds
of waveforms.
• In the late 1990s Cellular networks were considered as the most
obvious and potentially most lucrative market that SDR could
penetrate.
• • in 2005 GSM base station, which became the first SDR product
to receive approval under the newly established software radio
regulation.
• • In March 2005 Airspan released the first commercially available
SDR based IEEE 802.16 base station.
• • The AS.MAX base station uses picoarrays and a reference
software implementation of the IEEE 802.16d standard.
• • The AS.MAX base station promises to be upgradeable to the
next generation mobile 802.16e standard and so has the
potential to offer a future-proof route to operators looking to
rolling out WiMAX services.
• • GNU radio is an open-source architecture designed to
run on general-purpose computers.
• • Gnu radio has been extensively used as an entry-level
SDR within the research community.
• • Due to its high demand on computation and
processing, SDR technology has worked only in devices
that have less constraint in size and power
consumption, such as base stations and moving
vehicles.
• • However, as new processing platforms emerge that
overcome power and size constraints, it is very likely
that SDR will make its way into portable devices.
 POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF SDR

• SDR offers the greatest flexibility

• SDR provides Software Reusability

• Testing and Analysis made easy using SDR