Graphical modeling and optimization of air interface standards for Software Defined Radios

Design of software defined radio (SDR) systems is very challenging because it is very difficult to design a system that preserves most of the properties of the ideal software radio while being realizable with current day technology. The complexity of such systems is the bottleneck and without a careful design approach, no feasible realization may appear. This article introduces a new methodology for selecting the common operators to design SDR. It aims at minimizing the resources use. An SDR consists of software components whose behavior can be changed by reconfiguration procedure. In a common operator design this change requires only an adjustment of certain parameters. In order to optimize the choice of these operators we first make an oriented graph that shows the interrelationship between various components of the system. Then, an architectural exploration extracts the common operators of a given multi-standard system. The need for optimization in software defined radios is underlined and the two selected techniques for the optimization are thoroughly described. The benefits of simulating annealing (SA) technique are exemplified by a comparison with exhaustive search strategies for optimization.