Design and Implementation of a Versatile Wireless Communication System via Software Defined Radio

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to design and implement a low cost and flexible Software Defined Radio platform. Software Defined Radio is an emerging technology that gives engineers and scientists the ability to create reconfigurable wireless technology. Functions that were traditionally performed in hardware are implemented in software, thus making a Software Defined Radio reconfigurable without requiring hardware modifications. Current Software Defined Radio designs are usually based on a personal computer or Field Programmable Gate Array and offer either flexibility at a high cost of implementation or a low cost of implementation that sacrifices flexibility. In this work, a Software Defined Radio platform is presented which offers flexibility with a low cost of implementation. This is achieved by using a personal computer-based architecture with Universal Serial Bus interface to the analog-to-digital conversion and Radio Frequency modules. This external hardware interface, constructed from off the shelf components, provides the versatility for the proposed Software Defined Radio platform at minimal cost. A proof-of-concept design is then implemented and tested, which demonstrates the feasibility of the design.