Future Software-Defined Radio Platforms and Mapping Flows

A software-defined radio (SDR) system is a radio communication system in which physical layer components are implemented on a programmable or reconfigurable platform. The modulation and demodulation is performed in software and thus the radio is able to support a broad ran: of frequencies and functions concurrently. In the ideal SDR transceiver scheme, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) are attached to the antenna. This would imply that a digital signal processor (DSP) is connected to the ADC and the DAC, directly performing signal processing for the streams of data from/to antenna. Today, the ideal SDR transceiver scheme is still not feasible and thus some processing has to happen in the reconfigurable analog front end.