Software Defined Radio Platforms for Wireless Technologies

Abstract

Wireless connectivity standards have been developed by standardizing bodies to meet the requirements of various applications. A wireless transceiver should be equipped with a Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver to support a wireless standard. Traditional RF transceivers are designed and implemented on a radio chip or an embedded module in a System-on-a-Chip (SoC), ensuring small size, high performance, low power consumption, and cost. However, this traditional implementation design limits directly or indirectly the programmability and flexibility of the RF transceivers. An alternative solution to implement RF transceivers is using Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms. In the market, SDR platform hardware exists with different configurations, performance, cost, size, etc., making it hard to select the minimum SDR platform necessary to satisfy the wireless standard requirements. This paper aims to provide a list of well-known General Purpose Processor (GPP) based SDR platforms that meet the minimum specifications of selected wireless standards. To this end, we first review the characteristics of selected wireless technologies. Then, we investigate existing SDR platform architecture and their maximal performance in terms of the frequency range, bandwidth, symbol rate, bitrate, and latency support. Finally, we intersect the wireless standard requirements with the corresponding SDR platform parameters and provide a list of GPP-based SDR platforms for some existing wireless technology implementations. All investigations related to the frequency, bandwidth, symbol rate, and bitrate parameters are supported by theoretical results, whereas latency results are obtained from experiments by benchmarking existing implementations.

Keywords

• General purpose processor
• software defined radio
• transceivers
• wireless technologies