Radio Engineering: From Software Radio to Cognitive Radio

Chapter 10Methodology and Tools¹

 

 

 

10.1. Introduction

A major characteristic of a transmission system in the software radio (SR) context is its ability to reconfigure itself. By optimizing this feature, we can design efficient multistandard pieces of equipment that are capable of operating in different modes and offering numerous services. However, remember that, by definition, a flexible system is less efficient and consumes more electrical power than a dedicated one. This is the price to pay for flexibility, which must be compensated by innovative use of a flexible system compared to a rigid one.

Whatever the mechanism used to carry out these reconfigurations, it is important to minimize their costs by performing an analysis of multistandards at the algorithmic level. Thus, the first step is to find the convergence points between the standards to be supported by the equipment in order to determine common operations. This approach is called parametrization and is presented in section 10.2. It consists of finding a decomposition at different granularity levels of operations, and identifying and exploiting the redundancy called “common functions” and “common operators”. This study is oriented to a broader context of parametrization. The term parametrization includes all the techniques used to modify an operation by a simple change of parameters (and not modifying its basic structure). This concerns not only the operation associated with the physical layer, but also all the operations ...