An Architectural Analysis of Software-defined Radios

Nowadays there is a lot of wireless communication protocols being used, and this results in a series of difficulties for developers of systems that interacts with devices which can use different communication protocols. Software-defined radios (SDR) aims to solve this problem by using a software-based approach to provide flexibility on the implementation of the protocols physical layer. In this paper, an analysis of SDR implementation approaches is presented, and an architecture for SDR implementation is proposed. The architecture uses hybrid HW/SW components and programmable logic devices in order to enable the efficient implementation of softwaredefined radios from high level models. The results show that the architecture imposes a deterministic overhead to the SDR processing chain.