Soft radio implementations for 3G and future high data rate systems

Recent advances in reconfigurable computing have now made it possible to implement the concept of hardware paging which has the potential to greatly advance the design of soft radios. While many soft/software radio architectures have been suggested and implemented, there remains a lack of a formal design methodology that can be used to design and implement these radios on reconfigurable platforms that exploit the latest inventions. A unified architecture, called the layered radio architecture, for design of soft radios on a reconfigurable platform was presented previously by the authors (see IEEE Communications Magazine vol.38, no.2, p.140-7, February 2000). The layered architecture makes it possible to incorporate all of the features of a software radio while keeping complexity issues at a minimal level. The layered architecture also defines the methodology for incorporating changes and updates into the system. In this paper, we implement a RAKE receiver and channel estimation for W-CDMA downlink to show how the architecture combined with the use of the Custom Computing Machine Stallion, can handle 3G and future high data rate systems.