Software Radio

NTRG, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin.

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DAWN

Dublin Ad-hoc Wireless Network

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Software Radio

Overview

The NTRG is pursuing a line of research that goes beyond 3rd Generation mobile telephony standards into what we call 4th Generation mobile systems. This is a research effort that aims to define a replacement for the global fixed and mobile telephone networks with a core network based on IP technology and supporting many different kinds of wireless access networks. A node operating in these future networks must therefore be capable of adapting to the characteristics of the underlying network. We believe that software radio is an enabling technology in providing the adaptability needed to deal with the variety of wireless networks and that it has a significant role to play in 4th Generation Wireless Nodes.

General Purpose Processors

Traditionally, radio systems have been built using dedicated analogue hardware. More recently there has been a move towards digitising RF signals as close as possible to the antennae, thus replacing analogue components with DSPs. This method can simplify the design of a radio system and improve its overall performance. Our approach has been to use General Purpose Processors (GPPs) instead of dedicated DSP hardware. This technique has many advantages over DSPs:

High-level languages such as C/C++ can be used to develop radio systems
The system can take advantage of standard operating system services such as virtual memory and multi-threading
Unlike DSPs, code can be ported easily to new operating systems and processors
New standards can be implemented and deployed more quickly
Expensive dedicated hardware upgrades now become software upgrades

Our Work

We have implemented our own software radio testbed. More >>
We are developing a re-configurable Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Dynamic-OFDM transceiver systems using a radio development tool called IRIS (Implementing Radio In Software). IRIS is the product of three years of research work by NTRG. More >>
We are developing techniques for adaptive modulation and automatic modulation scheme detection. More >>
We have integrated our software radio into a generic communications stack. More information coming soon...
The NTRG is also working on reconfigurable radios based on General Purpose Processor platforms. More >>

Software Radio People:

Keith Nolan, Philip Mackenzie and Declan Flood are postgraduate students with the NTRG under the guidance of Dr Linda Doyle.