Software Defined Radio: Baseband Technologies for 3G Handsets and Basestations

Foreword

This volume in the Wiley series on Software Defined Radio drills down an additional level beyond the earlier texts into the technology reality required for practical SDR to come into its own in the marketplace. In the Wiley volume, Enabling Technologies, Chapter 2, an architecture view that discussed the division of the SDR into a ‘front-end’ (radio frequency aspects for transmit and receive) and a ‘back-end’ (the signal processing functionality) was espoused as a simple way of looking at the key areas of development. This present volume investigates the variety of approaches which is becoming available to satisfy the design of an SDR and takes a major step forward – treating the signal processing solutions in some depth. The progress and approaches described in these pages demonstrate that we are not simply seeing simple evolution of DSP, but rather something more profound which will have impact potentially beyond simply radio.

When I envisioned SDR in a commercial wireless mobile communication regime in the BellSouth Software Defined Radio RFI (Request For Information) which was released in December 1995, I was thinking how digital signal processing in the classical sense (architectures, performance, power usage, cost, size, etc.) would have to evolve in order to be a practical solution to a wide-ranging SDR universe. In particular, at the time, specific questions were posed to the industry postulating that the evolution of SDR would rely on advances in three important ...