Software Defined Radio Platforms for Wireless Technologies

Dereje M Molla,Hakim Badis,Marion Berbineau,Laurent George

doi:10.1109/access.2022.3154364

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.

Highlights

T HE number of wireless devices used by various wireless application domains such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) [1], Internet of Things (IoT) [2], cellular base stations [3], etc., has increased tremendously in the past decade
The proposed list is often restrictive in terms of hardware (SDR devices and General Purpose Processor (GPP) hosts) and doesn’t take into account the usecase desired by users
This paper has reviewed and presented a large list of GPP-based Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms that satisfy the minimum requirement of wireless technologies

Summary

Introduction

T HE number of wireless devices used by various wireless application domains such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) [1], Internet of Things (IoT) [2], cellular base stations [3], etc., has increased tremendously in the past decade. Some PHY layer digital baseband and time critical MAC layer functions are fully implemented on a digital hardware such as Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), a Programmable Digital Signal Processor (PDSP), Application Specific Instruction Set DSP (DSP ASIP) or a mixed solution using ASIC hardware accelerators with PDSP or with DSP ASIP [6]. This traditional implementation considerably limits directly or indirectly the programmability and flexibility of the transceivers for upgrading or handling multiple wire-

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Conclusion