Software Radio

As digital signal processing becomes more and more prominent in radio systems we need to continually develop algorithms and hardware (both processor based and FPGA based) to keep up. Software radio systems will both enhance our ability to test new wireless systems and improve the way that reconfigurable radios of the future will behave.

The software radio program will be expanded this year with the creation of the software radio prototyping lab. The lab will be built around the software radio platform that was designed at TRLabs (2002WC017) as well as a variety of commercial boards. The lab will have two objectives. The first is to be able to implement existing standards on the software radio platform so researchers will have the ability to test and modify the workings of these systems in ways that cannot be done with commercial systems. For example, the radio can be programmed to do advanced logging – triggering on specific events and recording the state of everything within the radio, right down to the original input signal. From this, we can learn the processes that cause errors within wireless LANs. Once the problems are isolated, changes to the internal workings of the radio can be implemented and tested. This type of system will be very useful as we introduce new services, such as video streaming with QoS, onto existing standards.