A software radio approach in digital communications laboratory teaching

During the past few years, the software radio has emerged from military research to become a fundamental technology in third-generation of cellular systems. These affordable, high performance transceivers offer great flexibility in systems which have to interoperate in multimode and multiband environments with different air-interface standards. For the same reasons, at DalTech, Dalhousie University, we adopted a concept of programmable software radios when developing an undergraduate laboratory for teaching digital communications courses in the ECE department. The motivating principle is that virtually any form of modulation can be implemented just by loading the DSP platform with the appropriate algorithm. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of baseband and passband transmitters in the testbed with Texas Instruments' TMS320C31 Digital Signal Processing Kits (DSK).