A hardware emulator testbed for software defined radio

In software defined radio (SDR), most of the traditionally analogue signal processing, synthesis and analysis functions of a communications system are performed digitally. However, critical hardware system components (such as analogue-digital-analogue conversion) still remain, making the full system design and testing more cumbersome. This paper presents an introductory overview on SDR and work-in-progress concerning the background and design considerations for a basic SDR hardware emulator. Hardware emulation allows fast and low-cost evaluation of possible hardware architectures. An object-orientated software design approach is taken, and the technical issues surrounding the development of hardware models are considered. Finally, a proposed system software architecture is presented.