Managing Software Defined Radio through cloud computing

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is a rapidly evolving technology that is receiving enormous recognition and generating widespread interest in the telecommunication industry. Over the last few years, analog radio systems are being replaced by digital radio systems for various radio applications in military, civilian and commercial spaces. In addition to this, programmable hardware modules are increasingly being used in digital radio systems at different functional levels. Commercial wireless communication industry is currently facing problems due to constant evolution of link-layer protocol standards (2.5G, 3G, and 4G), existence of incompatible wireless network technologies in different countries inhibiting deployment of global roaming facilities and problems in rolling-out new services/features due to wide-spread presence of legacy subscriber handsets. SDR technology aims to take advantage of these programmable hardware modules to build an open-architecture based radio system software. The digital signal processing chains can be implemented in software (software-defined radio [SDR] application) running on general-purpose hardware (SDR platform). Ongoing advances in radio engineering and digital signal processing necessitate employing processor array and automatic resource allocation tools that provide computing resources on demand. This paper explains how software-defined radio (SDR) clouds combine SDR concepts with cloud computing technology for designing and managing future base stations.