Software radio - architectural requirements, research and development challenges

Software radio becomes one of the central themes of wireless communications this decade. As the complexity of computations and system requirements of the software radio go beyond the capabilities of current technologies, we identify major technology, development and research issues and the possible approach to its gradual implementation. We present our approach to the software radio implementation and describe a scenario for experimenting with various concepts that will be integrated in software radio. We discuss underlying system architectures, system design tools and their hierarchy, design flow and describe the platform and design flow used in our experiments.