IRIS - A system for developing reconfigurable radios

This paper presents a system called IRIS (Implementing Radio In Software), a software test bed designed to allow users to develop and experiment with reconfigurable radio technology. The IRIS system is the culmination of extensive research into reconfigurable radio and represents a somewhat different approach to using DSP in radio systems. The term reconfigurable radio is used specifically in this context to differentiate the IRIS system from other software radio or software defined radio methodologies. This paper first outlines our approach to DSP enabled radio in the form of the reconfigurable radio, and second will demonstrate how this concept has been implemented in the form of the IRIS system. We show how the IRIS system can be used to build many different types of radio configurations and how this approach achieves various levels of reconfigurability.