A Software Defined Radio Proof-of-Concept Demonstration Platform

This paper presents our work on a demonstration platform for a software defined radio proof-of-concept. The aim of the demonstrator is to show seamless switching between different functions of an IEEE 802.11a [1] WLAN OFDM system on an adaptive execution environment. The mechanisms and interfaces for dynamic, reliable and secure Software Defined Radio (SDR) equipment reconfiguration are investigated. The adaptive execution environment concept is evaluated on the Real-Time Research Platform (RTRP). A Functional Description Language (FDL) based on XML is used to describe functional configurations for reconfigurable equipment. The FDL XML description is interpreted by the Configuration Control Module (CCM) using Signal Processing Modules (SPM) to create a binary configuration file for the target platform. A hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for uniform access to the heterogeneous signal processing hardware is defined. Finally a WLAN OFDM system is implemented on the platform and used to demonstrate the ideas discussed.