Smart antenna base station open architecture for SDR networks

Abstract

Software-defined radio system architecture must be. openly structured to various system standards. It should also provide capability for distributed processing, object-oriented design, and software controllability. This implies that the software to be used in the SDR system should be independent of a given hardware platform. In order to achieve these goals, the proposed SDR system utilizes modularization to maximize hardware reuse and design flexibility, which provides the system reconfigurability. The objective of this article is to provide an open architecture of a smart antenna base station (SABS) operating in the SDR with architecture that is object-oriented and software-controlled. For this purpose, the software and hardware of a SABS is first modularized and partitioned into modules, respectively. Then the interface among the modules is specified to determine the smart antenna application programming interface proper for the SDR network. The suitability of the proposed open architecture of SABS is verified through a design example of SABS implemented in accordance with the proposed architecture. The performance of the proposed system is shown in practical signal environments of CDMA2000 1X with commercial handsets operating at various data rates ranging from 9.6 to 153.6 kb/s in terms of frame error rate and signal-to-Interference-plus-noise ratio, which is dramatically improved through the nicely shaped beam pattern.