Programming models and implementation platforms for software defined radio configuration
Tanguy Risset, Riadh Ben Abdallah, Antoine Fraboulet, Jérôme Martin · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2011
Introduction Software means programmable. Hence software defined radio means that the radio should now be programmable . We know what computer programming means, and we agree, up to a certain level, on how it should be done. But do we know what programming a radio means? Several questions are still open: what will an SDR platform look like in ten years? Will there exist software radio code ? What will be the technical challenges and commercial issues behind this code? Programming is more precise than configuring or tuning, it implies a much greater level of freedom for the programmer. But it also means much cheaper implementations in many cases and in particular a re-use of the same hardware for different protocols (i.e. with different programs). This is, to our point of view, the main difficulty of software radio programming: reconfiguration and in particular dynamic reconfiguration. Dynamic (i.e. very fast) reconfiguration is now mandatory because some protocols, 3GPP-LTE (Third Generation Partnership Program Long Term Evolution) for instance, propose channel adapting for each frame , requiring a setting of the channel estimation parameter in a few milliseconds.