An architecture for software defined cognitive radio

Abstract

As we move forward towards the next generation of wireless protocols, the push for a better radio physical layer is ever increasing. Conventional radio architectures are limited to narrow operating regions and fails to adapt with changing technology. This is further strengthened with the advent of cognitive radio, which needs a more versatile and flexible framework that is programmable within the timing constraints of a protocol. In this paper we present an architecture for Software Defined Cognitive Radio that caters to the specific baseband processing requirements in a changing environment. We aim to provide more flexibility by de-constructing the radio pipeline into a framework of user controlled kernels that can be reconfigured at run-time. This architecture provides the bare-bones of a OFDM based radio physical layer that can adapt to perform a varied number of tasks in different radio networks. We also present a novel message based real-time reconfiguration method to transmit and receive a wide range of waveforms used in concurrent wireless protocols.