SDR for SRD: ADC specifications for reconfigurable gateways in urban sensor networks

Short Range Devices (SRD) are increasingly employed in urban sensor networks using different communication protocols. That becomes a key problem in the gateway design, since its cost and energy consumption increase with the number of implemented technologies. This cost and energy can be reduced by using a reconfigurable gateway to perform the biggest part of signal processing digitally, as it is done in Software-Defined Radio (SDR). As several received signals should be simultaneously digitized, Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) must be able to treat the whole frequency band used by SRD, with a high enough resolution to properly demodulate the signals. This paper describes what the ADC's constraints are and how to dimension an ADC in SDR for SRD. An example based on the SmartSantander deployment shows that an ADC resolution of 21 bits is required to properly demodulate the data.