An SDR-Based Wireless Communication Gateway for Vehicle Networks

As telematics and infotainment services are becoming more and more prevalent on the roadway, modern vehicles need to be equipped to support various wireless communication standards. The conventional ways for implementing those standards are dependent on their dedicated hardware chips, and thus in order to add a new standard or change an obsolete standard, a new dedicated hardware chip should be installed. Software defined radio (SDR) technology enables software components running on a generic hardware platform to perform signal processing instead of hardware chips. Thus, it is possible to support multi-standard, multi-band and multi-mode solutions and easy to enhance and reconfigure wireless communication. In this paper, we propose an SDR-based wireless communication gateway for vehicle networks. It integrates multiple wireless devices into one single wireless gateway reducing maintenance costs of hardware chips and improving flexibility, adaptability and connectivity of wireless communication. In order to provide the proof of concept, we present its application to digital multimedia broadcasting service.