Structures and Theories of Software Antennas for Software Defined Radio

Software radio or software defined radio (SDR) is a quite attractive field of research in terms of theoretical crossover research themes between radio engineering and computer science in academia as well as new multi-standard or all-purpose radio system products in industry [1], [2]. In order to promote research and development in a field of SDR this paper briefly introduces some prospective aspect and research themes on SDR. There are many approaches to research SDR such as architectures, devises, algorithms, description languages and API (application program interface) for achieving reconfigurability and downloadability in an SDR system. One of the approaches is to focus on an antenna for SDR. Although a baseband circuit is generally programable and reconfigurable, an antenna and a RF circuit are used to be less flexible and hardware-dependent and then result in a bottleneck for implementing an SDR system. However, an adaptive array antenna or a smart antenna named a software antenna is adaptively controllable and reconfigurable because it can be programable to form a desired beam pattern if an appropriate set of antenna weights is provided with software. It must be a vital tool for carrying out an SDR system. A software antenna can be considered as an adaptive filter in space and time domains for radio communications, so that the communication theory can be generalized from a conventional time domain into both space and time domains. This paper also introduces structures and theories of a software antenna which I have been studying before this millennium. key words: software de ned radio (SDR), adaptive array an-