Overview of Vanu Software Radio

This paper describes Vanu Software Radio technology and its benefits. Its benefits include lower development costs and increased versatility of radio equipment. Development cost and versatility have become important competitive factors for radio equipment manufacturers. Development cost is vital due to the increasing complexity of communications standards. Versatility is necessary due to the rapid evolution of standards, and due to high investment risk caused by market uncertainty among competing standards. Vanu Software Radio technology enables radio communication systems to be: • developed more quickly; • developed for one market, but used across many; • upgraded, modified or changed via software downloads; and • seamlessly migrated to lower cost, more efficient platforms (following Moore's law). Development work at Vanu, Inc. grew out of the research of the SpectrumWare software radio project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1998 most of the SpectrumWare team left MIT to start Vanu, Inc. Since then, Vanu has built software radio implementations of a variety of commercial and government waveforms, including the cellular telephone standards IS-91 AMPS, IS-136 TDMA, and GSM. Vanu Software Radio systems differ significantly from software defined radios (SDR). In Vanu Software Radio, most signal processing is done by general-purpose or hybrid general-purpose/DSP processors, not by traditional digital signal processors or field-programmable gate arrays. Almost all signal processing functions are implemented in high-level code running on top of a standard POSIX operating system, not in low-level code tied to the processor or board on which it runs. As a result, the waveforms and signal processing infrastructure have ported almost unchanged across Intel Pentium, Intel StrongARM, SuperH/Hitachi SH-4, Compaq Alpha and Motorola PowerPC processors, and are expected to port easily to a wide range of future processors. Portability of waveforms controls what happens to a manufacturer's investment in a waveform. In SDR the investment is tied to a particular hardware platform, which may cover only a part of the market and which will rapidly become obsolete. In Vanu Software Radio the investment is portable: the costs of developing the waveform can be amortized across markets and across multiple generations of products. Moreover, the manufacturer can quickly and cost-effectively adopt improved components or entire platforms as these appear in the COTS marketplace. With increased standards complexity, rapid evolution of standards and hardware, and market uncertainty, the portability of investment enabled by Vanu Software Radio leads to substantial competitive advantages.