Co-design for software defined radio using the software communications architecture

The term software radio has been introduced over ten years ago to identify the paradigm shift from static hardware based (analog and/or digital) radios to radios where waveforms are defined in software, allowing post-manufacturing reconfigurability of the radio. Emerging software defined radio (SDR) technologies usually make use of co-design approaches to provide flexible and high capacity digital platforms. This paper provides guidelines on how co-design approaches can be used in the software communications architecture (SCA). This is not meant to be a case study on co-design but rather a how-to to ensure portability, reuse and efficiency. The paper also discusses deployment issues with the SCA and how they relate to software and firmware.