A major concern of today’s and near future mobile communication systems is represented by the need of providing universal seamless connection to the users. Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems lend themselves to handle several different standards and types of service, and this motivates the already large
and still increasing interest in this research area. Eurecom and EPFL have started a joint project whose objective is to study and implement a real-time SDR communication platform to validate advanced algorithms for wireless communications. Due to various practical design issues, the platform implements the essential physical layer features of the time-division duplex (TDD) mode of the UMTS standard proposal (air-interface and signal processing), although frequency-division duplex (FDD) mode and even other standards could also be implemented. The platform is a real-time PC based system that can handle wideband radio resources. It provides hardware, DSP software, and link level software functionality. In this paper we address the major issues related to the design of a real-time SDR system. We also de-scribe
the general architecture, the signal processing techniques adopted to implement the transmitter and receiver SDR front-end, the current platform set-up, and we provide DSP performance measurements. Finally, we consider the future perspectives for the platform evolution.
