Software Radios for Wireless Networking.
Vanu G. Bose, Atif H. Shah, Michael Ismert · 1998
This paper describes a novel architecture for building software wireless network interfaces. These interfaces, implemented in user-level software, run on off-the-shelf PCs and replace all of the link and many of the physical layer functions typically implemented in dedicated hardware on a network interface card (NIC). They provide all of the processing needed to transform between wideband IF signals and network packets. Moving this functionality into user-level software has several advantages. Among other things, it makes it easy to implement protocols that adapt to different applications and environmental conditions. Our approach is compatible with the existing OSI protocol stack, but supports a finer granularity of layering. This finer granularity makes it possible for our NIC to dynamically change functions, such as modulation technique, that are fixed in other NICs. It also offers interfaces that facilitate interoperation with a variety of other systems, e.g., codecs. We also prese...