Special Issue on Efficiency in Wireless Software-Defined Radio Systems

Abstract

Efficient and effective broadband wireless technologies are required to support the foreseeable need to process and exchange large amounts of data. In this Special Issue of the Springer Journal of Signal Processing Systems various disciplines of such efficiency and effectiveness in the context of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) technologies are discussed. At first, a selection of articles focuses on “spectral efficiency”. Since frequency spectrum is known to be scarce and limited, it becomes a resource of increasing value whose utilization must be handled with care. The rapidly growing demand for higher data throughputs in wireless communication does not allow inefficient use of spectrum anymore. Two promising approaches to tackle the “spectral efficiency” issue are Cognitive Radio (CR) and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA). A Cognitive Radio is capable of learning and adapting to its transmission environment. Taking e.g. spectrum sensing results into account, the decisions for accessing the scarce frequency spectrum in the most flexible and effective manner are made. CRs are typically based on SDR technology. Thus, the first set of articles puts emphasis on topics in the areas of Cognitive Radio, Cognitive Radio Networks, and Spectrum Sensing. The second selection of articles addresses the problems of “energy efficiency” and “implementation efficiency”. Especially in wireless communications these types of efficiencies are highly important to increase battery time of modern SDRbased platforms. The architectures of such SDRs are typically based on heterogeneous multi-processor hardware platforms hosting General Purpose Processors (GPP), Digital Signal Processors (DSP), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and sometimes even more specific processing elements. Each type of processor has a specific advantage in one or the other performance criterion like energy consumption, flexibility, processing time, throughput, waveform portability, components reusability etc. Whenever a new waveform shall be implemented on an SDR, the system designer has to take the decision for the best possible trade-off between all of these, partly conflicting, criteria under the given circumstances. For instance, the portability of waveform components can be improved by fulfilling the constraints of the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) specification and by using common Application Programming Interfaces (API). Thus, the second set of articles puts particular emphasis on topics in the areas of SDR and SCA Implementations.