Executive Summary:
Traditional hardware based radios were soon recognized to be very limited in their functionality. 2G cell phones designed to run GSM protocols are becoming obsolete as 3G technologies start to prevail since they are based on fixed hardware that executes GSM protocols and are not able to run 3G standards such as W-CDMA. This amounts to wastage of a plenty of resources both in terms of money and time as new radios will be built from scratch. Problem behind all this has been identified as non-reconfigureability of conventional radios in any significant capacity. An emerging architecture generally referred to as software radio shifts much of the signal processing into software and reprogrammable hardware, enabling devices that can be reconfigured after deployment — including augmenting their functionality. This new idea was first envisioned by Dr. Joseph Mitola back in 1992 and since then there has been considerable amount of research efforts targeting the development of a fully functional SDR.
Our project is focused on developing an open-source signal processing API that would implement various baseband processing techniques and protocols for wireless communications in a parameterized fashion for Software-Defined Radio (SDR) applications. It will be developed for use with various OSSIE platforms (Please refer to literature review).
Baseband processing techniques in the jargon of wireless communications mainly consist of tasks such as: filtering, modulation/demodulation, channel estimation and error correction. Each of these tasks has implementation details depending upon the standard being implemented. Digital filtering specs, modulation/demodulation types etc are all generally dictated by the standard. And, a multi-standard software-defined radio, apart from changing its various parameters in one particular standard being executed at a time, implements a number of different standards (usually 2 or 3) depending upon its potential uses in different-standard regions of the world such as Europe, Asia or Americas and thus enhancing interoperability.
Building a fully functional multi-standard SDR poses, apart from hardware challenges of power consumption, parallelism and processing speed etc, a lot of challenges in software especially writing real-time DSP modules for various baseband processing techniques and for various standards. Moreover, writing control algorithms that decide changing parameters of the SDR and parameterization of various DSP modules remain open research challenges to date and a lot of projects are going on round the world targeting the same goals (see literature survey of this proposal). To develop a multi-standard DSP-API is the main theme of this proposal.
Our designed API will be open source and shall be available for nonprofit scientific and academic uses. It will be made available online and radio research community from all over the globe shall be welcome to make any changes or updates to it thus giving us an opportunity to learn from some of the top intellects around the world. It will be ready to use by hardware developers of the SDRs to fine tune and test their hardware platforms. Apart from setting up a research platform for wireless communications signal processing technologies, we see plenty of academic uses of our work by which we can teach our students in an efficient manner the modern communication technologies.
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