Abstract:
Telecommunications industry is in the midst of a veritable explosion in wireless technologies equipped with multiple standards and devices. As a result new wireless technologies are being introduced at an enormous pace. Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology has emerged as a new and promising technology to develop wireless communication systems. A Software Defined Radio is a radio in which the core functionality is defined in software right from the physical layer to the higher level protocol layer. The advent of SDRs has enabled the realization of multiband-multimode radios with run-time re-configurability, global roaming, over-the air programming, and waveform portability. The flexibility achieved by Software Defined Radios has revolutionized the architecture and development process, but the developers are posed with new tradeoffs to maximize performance and reduction in power consumption. Apart from cost, performance, size and power issues, certain other aspects like multiple platform support, technology insertion, software reusability and interoperability play a vital role in implementing an SDR. There are a number of options available to implement SDR but following a component based architecture, the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) promises to deliver the above mentioned advantages. The Software Communications Architecture is an open architecture developed to enhance software interoperability and reusability by the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program of the US Department of Defense. Although the SCA provides faster and easier development of flexible applications for SDR systems that are upgradeable and maintainable, its acceptance level is still far less than expected due to its steep learning curve for new radio engineers. This thesis gives a brief tutorial to introduce radio engineers with the aspects of SDR systems and SCA development techniques. Another concern lies in employing GPP as the modular distributed platforms in the SDR implementation, which is addressed by using a specialized DSP processor (TMS320C6748) to cater the signal processing needs.
