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Software-defined radio (SDR)

is a radio communication system where components that have been typically
implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers,
modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of
software on a personal computer or embedded system.
A basic SDR system may consist of a personal computer equipped with a sound
card, or other analog-to-digital converter, preceded by some form of RF front end.
Significant amounts of signal processing are handed over to the general-purpose
processor, rather than being done in special-purpose hardware (electronic circuits).
Such a design produces a radio which can receive and transmit widely different
radio protocols (sometimes referred to as waveforms) based solely on the software
used.
Software radios have significant utility for the military and cell phone services,
both of which must serve a wide variety of changing radio protocols in real time.
In the long term, software-defined radios are expected by proponents like the SDR
Forum (now The Wireless Innovation Forum) to become the dominant technology
in radio communications. SDRs, along with software defined antennas are the
enablers of the cognitive radio.
A software-defined radio can be flexible enough to avoid the "limited spectrum"
assumptions of designers of previous kinds of radios, in one or more ways
including:
Spread spectrum and ultrawideband techniques allow several transmitters
to transmit in the same place on the same frequency with very little
interference, typically combined with one or more error detection and
correction techniques to fix all the errors caused by that interference.

Software defined antennas adaptively "lock onto" a directional signal, so

that receivers can better reject interference from other directions, allowing
it to detect fainter transmissions.
 Dynamic transmitter power adjustment, based on information
communicated from the receivers, lowering transmit power to the
minimum necessary, reducing the near-far problem and reducing
interference to others, and extending battery life in portable equipment.
Wireless mesh network where every added radio increases total capacity
and reduces the power required at any one node. Each node only transmits
loudly enough for the message to hop to the nearest node in that direction,
reducing near-far problem and reducing interference to others.

Cognitive radio techniques: each radio measures the spectrum in use

and communicates that information to other cooperating radios, so that
transmitters can avoid mutual interference by selecting unused frequencies.
Alternatively, each radio connects to a geolocation database to obtain
information about the spectrum occupancy in its location and, flexibly,
adjusts its operating frequency and/or transmit power not to cause
interference to other wireless services.
 cognitive radio (CR) is a radio that can be programmed and configured
dynamically to use the best wireless channels in its vicinity. Such a radio
automatically detects available channels in wireless spectrum, then accordingly
changes its transmission or reception parameters to allow more concurrent wireless
communications in a given spectrum band at one location. This process is a form
of dynamic spectrum management.
Depending on transmission and reception parameters, there are two main types
of cognitive radio:
Full Cognitive Radio (Mitola radio), in which every possible parameter observable
by a wireless node (or network) is considered.
Spectrum-Sensing Cognitive Radio, in which only the radio-frequency spectrum is
considered.
The main functions of cognitive radios are:
Power Control: Power control is usually used for spectrum sharing CR systems to
maximize the capacity of secondary users with interference power constraints to
protect the primary users.
Spectrum sensing: Detecting unused spectrum and sharing it, without harmful
interference to other users; an important requirement of the cognitive-radio
network is to sense empty spectrum. Detecting primary users is the most efficient
way to detect empty spectrum. Spectrum-sensing techniques may be grouped into
three categories:
o Transmitter detection: Cognitive radios must have the capability to determine if a
signal from a primary transmitter is locally present in a certain spectrum. There are
several proposed approaches to transmitter detection:
Matched filter detection
Energy detection: Energy detection is a spectrum sensing method that detects the
presence/absence of a signal just by measuring the received signal power.This
signal detection approach is quite easy and convenient for practical
implementation. To implement energy detector, however, noise variance
information is required. It has been shown that an imperfect knowledge of the
noise power (noise uncertainty) may lead to the phenomenon of the SNR wall,
which is a SNR level below which the energy detector cannot reliably detect any
transmitted signal even increasing the observation time. It has also been shown that
the SNR wall is not caused by the presence of a noise uncertainty itself, but by an
 insufficient refinement of the noise power estimation while the observation time
increases.
Cyclostationary-feature detection: These type of spectrum sensing algorithms are
motivated because most man-made communication signals, such as BPSK, QPSK,
AM, OFDM, etc. exhibit cyclisation behavior. However, noise signals (typically
white noise) do not exhibit cyclisation behavior. These detectors are robust against
noise variance uncertainty. The aim of such detectors is to exploit the cyclisation
nature of man-made communication signals buried in noise. Cyclisation detectors
can be either single cycle or multicycle cyclisation.
Wideband spectrum sensing: refers to spectrum sensing over large spectral
bandwidth, typically hundreds of MHz or even several GHz. Since current ADC
technology cannot afford the high sampling rate with high resolution, it requires
revolutional techniques, e.g., compressive sensing and sub-Nyquist sampling.
o Cooperative detection: Refers to spectrum-sensing methods where information
from multiple cognitive-radio users is incorporated for primary-user detection
o Interference-based detection
Null-space based CR: With the aid of multiple antennas, CR detects the null-space of
the primary-user and then transmits within the null-space, such that its subsequent
transmission causes less interference to the primary-user
Spectrum management: Capturing the best available spectrum to meet user
communication requirements, while not creating undue interference to other
(primary) users. Cognitive radios should decide on the best spectrum band
(of all bands available) to meet quality of service requirements; therefore,
spectrum-management functions are required for cognitive radios.
Spectrum-management functions are classified as:
Spectrum analysis
Spectrum decision

References: {Wikipedia}

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