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Abstract
Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is a rapidly evolving technology
that is receiving enormous recognition and generating
widespread interest in the telecommunication industry.
Over the last few years, analog radio systems are being
replaced by digital radio systems for various radio
applications in military, civilian and commercial spaces.
In addition to this, programmable hardware modules are
increasingly being used in digital radio systems at
different functional levels. SDR technology aims to
take advantage of these programmable hardware modules
to build an open-architecture based radio system software.
SDR technology facilitates implementation of some
of the functional modules in a radio system such as
modulation/demodulation, signal generation, coding and
link-layer protocols in software. This helps in building
reconfigurable software radio systems where dynamic
selection of parameters for each of the above-mentioned
functional modules is possible. A complete hardware
based radio system has limited utility since parameters
for each of the functional modules are fixed. A radio
system built using SDR technology extends the utility
of the system for a wide range of applications that
use different link-layer protocols and modulation/demodulation
techniques.
Commercial wireless communication industry is currently
facing problems due to constant evolution of link-layer
protocol standards (2.5G, 3G, and 4G), existence of
incompatible wireless network technologies in different
countries inhibiting deployment of global roaming facilities
and problems in rolling-out new services/features due
to wide-spread presence of legacy subscriber handsets.
SDR technology promises to solve these problems by
implementing the radio functionality as software modules
running on a generic hardware platform. Further, multiple
software modules implementing different standards can
be present in the radio system. The system can take
up different personalities depending on the software
module being used. Also, the software modules that implement
new services/features can be downloaded over-the-air
onto the handsets. This kind of flexibility offered
by SDR systems helps in dealing with problems due to
differing standards and issues related to deployment
of new services/features.
To know more about Wipro in consumer electronics, go
to www.wipro.com/consumerelectronics/
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