A Low Complexity Reconfigurable Multi-stage Channel Filter Architecture for Resource-Constrained Software Radio Handsets

Software defined radio (SDR) is emerging as a powerful platform for future generation cellular systems, due to its capability to operate conforming to multiple mobile radio standards. Channelizer in an SDR operates at the highest sampling rate and hence a low complexity design is needed for the most computationally intensive part of the SDR receiver. The channel filters in the channelizer extracts radio channels of varying bandwidths, corresponding to various communication standards from the wideband input signal. An architecture for implementing low complexity, low power and reconfigurable channel filter for the SDR mobile handsets, based on multi-stage frequency response masking (FRM) is proposed in this paper. The proposed architecture is unique in a way that it is able to effectively exploit the redundancy in multi-stage realization by utilizing the common masking filters and also capable of extracting varying bandwidth channels. Design examples show that the proposed architecture offers 47.5% complexity reduction and 18.1% power reduction over single-stage FRM approach.