Section: Research Program

Flexible Radio Front-End

Participants : Guillaume Villemaud, Florin Hutu.

This axis mainly deals with the radio front-end of software radio terminals (right of Fig 3). In order to ensure a high flexibility in a global wireless network, each node is expected to offer as many degrees of freedom as possible. For instance, the choice of the most appropriate communication resource (frequency channel, spreading code, time slot,...), the interface standard or the type of antenna are possible degrees of freedom. The multi-* paradigm denotes a highly flexible terminal composed of several antennas providing mimo features to enhance the radio link quality, which is able to deal with several radio standards to offer interoperability and efficient relaying, and can provide multi-channel capability to optimize spectral reuse. On the other hand, increasing degrees of freedom can also increase the global energy consumption, therefore for energy-limited terminals a different approach has to be defined.

In this research axis, we expect to demonstrate optimization of flexible radio front-end by fine grain simulations, and also by the design of home made prototypes. Of course, studying all the components deeply would not be possible given the size of the team, we are currently not working in new technologies for dac /adc and power amplifiers which are currently studied by hardware oriented teams. The purpose of this axis is to build system level simulation taking into account the state of the art of each key component.