TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter explores both the hardware and software domains of software defined radio (SDR). The span of information covered is necessarily broad; therefore, it focuses on some aspects of hardware and software that are especially relevant to SDR design. Beyond their obvious differences, hardware and software analyses have some subtle differences. In general, hardware is analyzed in terms of its capabilities. For example, a particular radio frequency (RF) front-end (RFFE) can transmit up to a certain frequency, a data converter can sample a maximum bandwidth, and a processor can provide a maximum number of million instructions per second (MIPS). Software, in contrast, is generally treated as an enabler. For example, (1) a signal processing library can support types of modulation, (2) an OS can support multithreading, or (3) a particular middleware implementation can support naming structures. Given this general form of viewing hardware and software, this chapter presents hardware choices as an upper bound on performance, and software as a minimum set of supported features and capabilities.
Cognitive radio (CR) assumes that there is an underlying system hardware and software infrastructure that is capable of supporting the flexibility demanded by the cognitive algorithms. In general, it is possible to provide significant flexibility with a series of tunable hardware components that are under the direct control...
