A SUGGESTION OF PROGRAMMABLE SMART ANTENNA BASE STATION WITH SDR TECHNOLOGY

The objective of developing the SDR technology is to realize plural system standards on a single hardware platform that is implemented mainly with the high-speed programmable digital signal processing devices[1]. A desired system standard can be selected by choosing a proper software module. This paper addresses the problem of designing the hardware and software architecture of SABS that operates in an SDR network. A design example of SABS architecture that satisfies the requirements of SDR functionalities is also provided in this paper. We propose a hardware platform employing the open architecture of SABS, with which one can realize the multimode SDR system by selecting the modularized software. Note that the hardware platform itself remains unchanged while selecting a desired system standard among plural different standards[2]. The SDR technology includes the design of both hardware and software modules. The hardware module is reconfigured by the software module, which means that a given hardware platform is converted into a specific system standard or specialpurpose communication system depending on the change of the software module. It is the most important feature of the SDR technology that a system update or an addition/deletion/modification of services can be performed extremely easily without changing the existing hardware[3]. In this paper, we present an open architecture of SABS that is suitable to the SDR network in such a way that one can fully exploit the merits of both smart antenna and SDR technologies. The proposed architecture has been applied to implement a system of SABS, which includes the modulation and demodulation parts of the SABS together with the interfaces with the SDR network as well as that among the modules within the SABS. The suitability of the proposed open architecture is demonstrated through a quantitative analysis obtained through the various experimental measurements provided from the design example of SABS.