From reconfigurable SDR to cognitive femto-cell: A practical platform

Cognitive radio (CR) and Femto-cell (FC) are both attractive technologies due to their marvelous potential to solve problems in current wireless communication systems. The creative combination of CR and FC, resulting in cognitive femto cell (CFC), will be an essential part of the future wireless communication systems. In this paper, we develop a reconfigurable SDR platform for implementation of cognitive femto-cell base station. The platform consists of a baseband processing module with four DSP chipsets and two FPGA chipsets, two independent Analog-to-Digital and Digital-to-Analog modules, and a reconfigurable RF module. The baseband processing module is equipped with software defined physical layers of three different wireless communication systems (GSM/WLAN/W CDMA). We can configure the platform via a unified control interface on PC to choose communication system and operation parameters.