A software radio architecture for the baseband level of the multi-standard user terminal: Design methodology and computational assessment

In this paper we present a design methodology and system prototyping for the baseband level of the Software Defined Radio (SDR)-based portable multi-standard terminal. The SDR-based architecture consists of three main layers denoted as: i) Upper Layer to provide communication with an end user and a network; ii) Middle Layer to establish the required protocol configuration; and iii) Bottom Layer to execute the protocol algorithm. Main concern was based on the examination of the SDR-based module behavior in the heterogeneous environment. As a case study we have chosen two different wireless communication standards: data-oriented WiMAX (IEEE 802.16d) and voice-oriented UMTS (release 1999). The simulation of the digital signal processing for both standards was performed in the MATLAB environment. The goal is to achieve and to verify the given system configuration depending on the environment characteristics. For this reason we show that SDR-based module can recognize the required protocol configuration and tune the system accordingly.