Design of fault-tolerant digital filters based on redundant residue number arithmetic for over-the-air reconfiguration in software radio communication systems

Over-the-air reconfiguration is a key characteristic of software defined radio communication systems. It offers great advantages in terms of cost-effective software deployment to a large number of user terminals. It also enables manufacturers and service providers to introduce additional features in hardware components after their shipment. Even though automatic repeat request (ARQ) or forward error correction (FEC) schemes are used for error control in transmission of configuration data (CD), the received configuration data may not be error free, therefore, the erroneous CD result in implementation of faulty circuits. In order to reduce the effects of the CD error, fault-tolerant processing is provided in circuits to be reconfigured over the air. We designed fault-tolerant digital filters based on redundant residue number arithmetic. A computer simulation model is described and simulation results are presented for the filters operating in the presence of simulated hardware failures.