Dynamic Deployment of Software Defined Radio Components for Mobile Wireless Internet Applications

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a key enabling technology for mobile wireless Internet. SDR represents unique opportunity to provide Internet connectivity to handheld devices over a limitless range of communication standards. For SDR systems to realize their full potential, they must be reconfigurable through the dynamic deployment of SDR components. However, the current SDR Forum standard, Software Communication Architecture (SCA), is insufficient in this respect since it fails to provide a complete component framework. In this paper, we propose a SCA-based component framework for SDR. Specifically, we present (1) a component model that defines a component as a specialized CORBA object that implements object management functionality, (2) a package model exploiting the existing XML descriptors of the SCA, and (3) a deployment model that defines a SCA-based deployment environment, a boot-up process to restore deployment state, and a deployment process supporting lazy application instantiation and dynamic component replacement. Frameworks that incorporate these improvements will meet the dynamic software deployment needs of next-generation wireless Internet applications.