Why SDR Is Not Enough: The Power of Software Defined Systems

摘要

Software defined radio (SDR) has become the dominant technology for radios deployed for military communications, satellite communications, public safety communications, commercial wireless infrastructure and even mobile handsets. This has come about for many reasons, including the need for multi-mode support, the flexibility to adapt to ever evolving air interface protocols even after deployment, and the development cost savings and time-to-market benefit from software code reuse. So, given this level of success, what does the future hold for SDR? In fact, SDR was just the beginning for SDS, or software defined systems. Increasingly, systems like handsets and even mobile infrastructure need to be much more than a radio. Handsets need the computational performance to not only do multimode radios, but also tasks such as video coding, computational imaging, graphics acceleration, analytics, etc. For infrastructure with a longer lifetime, future-proofing is an important characteristic, but in addition, there is value in putting data content from the cloud next to the radio access network, which necessitates storage and video processing, as well as radio processing. In order to make SDS a reality, however, a new architecture is required to support a processing paradigm that extends beyond multi-mode to multi-application, such as radios, cameras, gaming, etc. Therefore, this architecture has to have the performance to support computationally intensive standards such as LTE-Advanced or H.265, as well as tasks that may not even be fully known at deployment, at very low power. Architectural options for software defined systems will be explored.