Software Defined Radio: Architectures, Systems and Functions

14

Management, Control and Data Interfaces

K. Moessner and S. Gultchev

University of Surrey and MVCE

14.1 Reconfigurable Elements

The classical approach for solving the various air interface standard problem has been that manufacturers were forced to produce their own legacy implementation of a radio platform. However, applying this rigid approach to software radios would lead to very restrictive software defined platforms that would merely allow the reconfiguration using manufacturer verified software. Such a legacy approach is a contradiction to an open platform and would deny the user the advantages of the origin al Software Defined Radio (SDR) ideas [1]. Instead, such a manufacturer-specific approach would result in numerous different radio processing platforms, each following a different modularisation approach. In addition, reconfiguration software would be product-specific instead of being generally useable.

Preceding chapters in this book have described the requirements for reconfigurable systems looking from the user, manufacturer, and operator viewpoints; they also outlined the functionality to be provided by networks to support reconfigurable terminals. But one may ask: What are the effects of reconfigurability on mobile networks? Which levels of the network are affected by reconfigurability? And how can reconfigurability be cast into a framework without limiting the degree of freedom it offers in the first place?

Reconfigurability influences all levels within a communication ...