Software Defined Radio
Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a modern approach of transferring telecommunications engineering hardware into software. The basis for that is a minimalistic hardware setup consisting of an antenna, HF-device and high performance A/D and D/A converters. The main goal is to keep the hardware as simple as possible: the whole base band signal processing shall be done in software. Systems like these are not restricted to be only transmitters and can be used as receivers in highly mobile applications as well. The significantly higher flexibility of software through upgrades enables fast adaption to changes in system standardisations. The target platforms are high performance digital signal processors (DSP), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and ARM based embedded systems that can cope with high data rates of mostly OFDM based transmission systems.
The work in the field of SDR at the chair of Digital- and Circuit Technology is set primarily in research, development and implementation of robust base band algorithms for a variety of SDR implementations in highly mobile scenarios like broadcast and mobile communication. The tasks are subdivided as follows:
- Development and adaption of robust acquisition- and tracking algorithms for OFDM based SDR receiver for error estimation regarding time-, frequency and sample rate offset
- Design of software simulations to fully analyse OFDM base transmission systems
- Development of adaptive channel estimation procedures for OFDM based coherent receivers
- Testing of possibilities concerning algorithmic combination of different OFDM based SDR entities
- Practical implementation of total systems