Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Will Software Radio Become Real—And When?

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:33:46 -0500

Will Software Radio Become Real—
And When?

In this fifth annual overview of
software defined radio, it’s
reasonable to ask when—
if ever—its promise will
become a reality.

SDR remains a hot topic
within both the DoD and
COTS community, for it
offers the promise of software reconfigurability
for users, and a channel to provide
signal processing technology from COTS
suppliers. This month, we’ve divided the
subject into two parts. Here in Part 1,
Contributing Editor David Cotton presents
the state of the industry, followed by a
contributed article from one supplier with
the stripes to prove success. Part 2 will run
in a future issue of COTS Journal.
—Ed.

=============================================

Software Defined Radio: Part 1

January 2004
COTS Journal [ 29 ]

COTS Journal has been writing about
software defined radio every
January since 2000, and has published
supplements on the topic in April
2002 and March 2003. But, while both
interest in the subject—also known as
SDR or just plain software radio—and
the flow of information about it seem to
grow almost exponentially, by now it
seems fair to ask the question, “When—if
ever—will SDR become a reality?”

Initially, the focus of software radio
was almost totally on its military applications,
as the United States struggled with
the incompatibilities between the radio
systems of its various armed forces as well
as those of its allies.Next came commercial
interests, as the elements of the worldwide
wireless telephony industry began to see
the possibility that SDR technology could
help to solve some of their incompatibility
problems. The startling events of
September 11, 2001, helped to highlight the
fact that the public safety sector suffers from
some of the same communications incompatibilities
that plague the military. And
today there appears to be an almost universal
recognition that the entire worldwide
communications structure can be strongly
impacted by various elements of SDR.
But, in addition to its several enumerated
markets—military, commercial and
public safety—software radio also
encompasses a number of technologies
from antennas to base stations, chipsets,
waveforms and the software to run them all.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the significant
developments of the past year in
order to see when—if ever—the promise
of software radio becomes real.

Updating Military Efforts
For a number of years, the U.S. military
has focused their tactical communications
programs toward providing a family
of software programmable radios that
would both enhance their warfighters’
wireless communications capabilities and
decrease the total cost of ownership of
their infrastructure. This program is
known as the Joint Tactical Radio System
(JTRS) and an update of key events in
2003 is shown in the accompanying sidebar:
“JTRS Changes Cluster Alignments”
beginning on page 30.

The JTRS vision is to interoperate
with allied and coalition forces.Many U.S.
allies are either following the U.S. lead or,
in some cases, racing on ahead. The
Canadian armed forces are aided in part
by the role that Canadian companies like
ICS (a subsidiary of Radstone Technology)
and Spectrum Signal Processing are
playing in the development of key components
of software radio. The Communications
Research Center Canada undertook
a Software Communications Architecture
(SCA) Reference Implementation
Project sponsored by the Software Defined
Radio Forum (SDRF) and Defence
Research and Development Canada. This
project developed an SCA v2.1 Core

More:
http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/pdfs/2004/01/cots01_softerside1.pdf

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