Rapid development of a P25 JTRS waveform

Past disaster response experience, as well as existing terrorism threats, demands close collaboration between the military and public safety command structure in possible future operations. Establishing radio communication between military commanders, soldiers and law enforcement officers is an important enabling capability to facilitate interoperability. The JTRS program is enabling communications between military branches by implementing different military radio waveforms on JTRS software-defined radio platforms. Therefore, it is natural to include a Project 25 (P25) public safety digital radio waveform in the JTRS waveform portfolio. This paper describes the rapid development of a P25 waveform on the Spectrum Signal Processing SDR-4000, a surrogate JTRS software-defined radio platform. The development process and methodology, which starts from a platform-agnostic executable waveform model in Matlab, through an intermediate implementation using open tools on generic platforms, to the final platform-specific implementation, is introduced and discussed. This paper shows that adopting this methodology can speed up waveform development and porting.