2005 Ohio Student Research Forum

Abstract

Software Defined Radio in Communication Systems
Moussa Souare’, University of Akron
Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics
Mentor: Dr. Okechukwu Ugweje

The functionality of conventional radio architectures is usually determined primarily by hardware with minimal configurability through software. The hardware consists of the amplifiers, filters, mixers and oscillators. The software is confined to controlling the interface with the network, error correction, etc. Since the hardware dominates the design, upgrading a conventional radio design essentially means completely abandoning the old design and starting over again. However, the term software radio refers to the class of reprogrammable or reconfigurable radios. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an emerging technology, with the potential to build flexible radio systems, multi-service, multi-standard, multi-band, reconfigurable and reprogrammable radios by software. A working definition of a SDR is a radio that is substantially defined in software and whose physical layer behavior can be significantly altered through changes to its software. It is generally believed that SDR has the capability to provide adaptive access, thus it is a key enabling technology for future generation systems. The presence of the software defining the radio interface necessarily implies the use of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) or some other platform to replace dedicated hardware, to execute, in real time, the necessary software.