DATA COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES & ARCHITECTURES FOR DISTRIBUTED SDR TRANSCEIVER SYSTEMS Frank Van Hooft (Spectrum Signal Processing, Burnaby, BC, Canada;
[email protected]) 1. INTRODUCTION some number of modem / codec / baseband processing instances. Assume greater than one for all of these. In The increasing visibility of SDR as a viable addition there is a control plane to manage the system. communications technology is driving equipment This architecture is illustrated in Figure 1. consumers to demand ever-greater performance. Today On the receive side, this subsystem receives either even the highest bandwidth & datarate waveforms are digitized IF or baseband signals, extracts multiple user candidates for SDR implementations. Coupled with a channels from these signals in the channelizer, then desire for the maximum possible number of simultaneous channels, the high-end SDR implementations can absorb forwards these channels to channel processing for all of the processing power that can physically be applied demodulation and decoding. This process is reversed on to them. the transmit side, with payload data being encoded and In concert with high processing power comes a high modulated in the channel processor and then inserted into data throughput requirement. Wide RF bandwidths and the output signal by the channelizer for transmission. In a multi-channel implementations generate massive amounts distributed transceiver architecture, the channelization and of data that must be routed in real-time between various channel processing functions are distributed across elements of the SDR system. Without reliable data paths multiple signal processing elements, with a single the SDR system could not function. Yet the datarates channelizer often supporting multiple channel processors.