Keynote speaker 2: Reconfigurable antennas for software defined radio

In recent years, wireless communications systems are popular not only for voice communication, but also for data communication. The performance of voice and data will be degraded during wave propagation. This is called propagation fading. The propagation fading will decrease the signal to noise ratio. For smaller signal to noise ratio, the performances of communication range, BER (bit error rate), and data throughput rate will also be degraded. In order to overcome these serious effects of propagation fading, various kinds of reconfigurable antennas are developed for SDR (software defined radio) communication systems. By reconfiguring the existing antenna hardware to change the performance of antenna, the antenna will be more powerful for the application in SDR communication system. The reconfigurable antennas are one of the important parts in SDR communication system. By minor adjusting the reconfigurable antenna, the communication range, lower BER, and higher data throughput rate can be highly improved.