Section: Application Domains

Example of SDR applications

The sdr concept is not new and many research teams have been working on its implementation and use in various contexts, however two elements are in favor of Socrate's orientation towards this technology:

1. The mobile sdr technology is becoming mature. Up to now, Software-Defined Radio terminals were too expensive and power consuming for mobile terminals, this should change soon. For instance, cea 's Magali platform has demonstrated part of lte -Advanced standard recently. It is important for applied researchers to be ready when a new technology rises up, opening to many new software issues.

2. Rhône-Alpes is a strategic place for this emerging technology with important actors such as ST -Microelectronics, cea , Minalogic and many smaller actors in informatics for telecommunication and embedded systems.

sdr technologies enable the following scenarios:

• Transparent radio adaptation: Depending on the available wireless protocols in the air (e.g. Wifi versus umts ), a terminal may choose to communicate on the cheapest, or the fastest channel.

• Radio resource allocation: In order to minimize expensive manual cell planning and achieve “tighter” frequency reuse patterns, resulting in improved system spectral efficiency, dynamic radio resource management is a promising application of sdr .

• White space: By sensing the air, a terminal is able to communicate using a particular frequency which is not used even if it is reserved for another kind of application.

• Cooperation: Using the neighboring terminals, a user can reduce power consumption by using relay communication with the base station.

• Saturated bands: A fixed wireless object, e.g. a gas meter sending regular data through the air, might check if the frequency it uses is saturated and choose, alone or in a distributed manner with other gas meters, to use another frequency (or even protocol) to communicate.

• Radars: With numerical communications, passive radar technology is changing, these radars will have to be updated regularly to be able to listen to new communication standards.

• Internet of things: With the predicted massive arrival of wireless object, some reconfigurability will be needed even on the simplest smart object as mentionned above for facing the band saturation problem or simply communicating in a new environment.