Green Reconfigurable Radio Systems

Abstract

The wireless standards scene and its evolution strengthens the need for functional flexibility in future radios. Multimode terminals supporting an increasingly large variety of standards (cellular, WLANs, WMANs, WPANs) are subject to a cost increase that is addressed by more flexible radio interfaces. Energy efficiency, however, is the main obstacle to successfully deploying such reconfigurable radios. To address this, it is essential to design energy-scalable SDRs, both for the radio front-end and the digital baseband platform. Complementing this, an essential ingredient is an intelligent controller that optimally exploits this scalability and the run-time dynamics to translate potential energy scalability to actual low-power operation. To realize this goal, an energy-aware cross-layer radio management framework is introduced. It was instantiated in different case studies, showing the applicability of this approach in realistic setups. Results have shown that substantial gains can be achieved through effective cross-layer optimization and problem partitioning. Next, it was shown that SDRs will play a crucial role in enabling CRs, which will enable saving on both the scarce radio spectrum and battery lifetime. A key building block for the design of such CRs, i.e., the appropriate control intelligence to make the SDR platform cognitive, can be derived by incrementally building on the proposed framework. As a result, green (or environment friendly) reconfigurable radio systems will emerge, which offer a wide variety and ubiquitous availability of wireless services, while overcoming energy and spectrum scarcity