Software defined radio architecture for cellular networks base stations: the SUNBEAM project

摘要

With the arrival of 3G radio mobile communications standards namely UMTS, new requirements arose for the wireless cellular networks. They concern the quality of the transmissions, the compatibility with pre-existing 2G networks and between different 3G networks and of course the increasing bandwidth to bring new high data rate demanding services through IP connections. The SUNBEAM project was at the convergence of two key enabling technologies for 3G: software radio and smart antennas. Software radio appears to be an unavoidable approach to fulfil these specifications, but it needs to be used with new hardware architectures designed to support it. ACTS European project SUNBEAM just covered partially this subject as it concerned flexible multi-standard smart BTS architecture study in the context of the migration of European networks from 2G (GSM, DCS 1800) to 3G (UMTS/FDD, UMTS/TDD), concentrating on the physical layer. Digital smart antennas techniques were central in the scope of SUNBEAM, since they are to bring the decisive performance improvements 3G transmissions require. This paper summarises the essential results achieved within the project and makes an attempt to establish global specifications for BTS architecture design to achieve the flexibility, the reconfigurability and the scalability needed to implement software radio.