Performance Trade-offs of a Software Defined Radio for 2G and 3G Cellular Mobile Communication Standards

Rapidly growing cellular wireless industry demands for global roaming and dynamic adaptation of the air interface to the time variant radio channel, the service and the cell type. This flexibility can only be achieved by a software radio, which performs all baseband functions in software and therefore totally software programmable. For realizing this, a general purpose software platform that describes the air interface components of various standards, is required. In this paper, a combined software platform for the baseband transceiver processing, which can operate in the IS-95 (2G standard) as well as CDMA2000 (3G standard) cellular environment, is implemented by considering some tradeoffs between the specifications of two standards. A common description have been developed for the implementation of the transceiver functions like channel codec, interleaver, modem, rake receiver etc using parameterized software approach. The BER performance of different radio configurations of CDMA2000 are compared with that of IS-95 against the selected trade-off parameters