Cross Layer Performance Evaluation of a Software Defined Radio UWB Receiver using Turbo Decoding

The design of a software defined radio (SDR) receiver is a persisting research challenge. Our research work makes an attempt to utilize wideband transmission techniques like ultra-wideband (UWB) for the detailed cross-layer design of a SDR receiver. But UWB signals are prone to severe multipath fading. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is introduced in our SDR receiver since it is robust to multipath fading. The addition of iterative Turbo decoding further improves the performance of the SDR receiver in such scenario. Additionally, rake filtering is included for optimal coherence of multipath components. The performance of the receiver has been evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER) analysis in severe multipath faded channels with exponential power delay profile. Dynamic channel assignment is performed by the cognitive radio and the multi-access interference power due to such allocations considering adjacent SDR receivers has been characterized and evaluated in our MAC layer simulations.