Building Software-Defined Radios in MATLAB Simulink - A Step Towards Cognitive Radios

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a flexible architecture which can be configured to adapt various wireless standards, waveforms, frequency bands, bandwidths, and modes of operations. This paper presents a detailed survey of the existing hardware and software platform for SDRs. It also presents prototype system for designing and testing of software defined radios in MATLAB/Simulink and briefly discusses the salient functions of the prototype system for Cognitive Radio (CR). A prototype system for wireless personal area network is built and interfaced with a Universal Software Radio Peripheral-2 (USRP2) main-board and RFX2400 daughter board from Ettus Research LLC. The philosophy behind the prototype is to do all waveform-specific processing such as channel coding, modulation, filtering etc. on a host (PC) and general purpose high-speed operations like digital up and down conversion, decimation and interpolation etc. inside FPGA on an USRP2. MATLAB has a rich family of toolboxes that allows building software-defined and cognitive radio to explore various spectrum sensing, prediction and management techniques.