Software Defined Radio

Traditional radio transmitters and receivers use analogue front-ends in combination with dedicated digital processing at baseband. The analogue front-end limits frequency agility and operating bandwidths, while the dedicated digital processing limits flexibility in terms of coding/modulation etc. The aim of software defined radio (SDR) is to remove some of these constraints by moving the A/D and D/A converters nearer to the antenna and by employing FPGA or DSP based baseband processing. A project is underway which is considering how MIMO concepts may be implemented efficiently in SDR.