Channelization Techniques for Software Defined Radio

The ability to support multiple communications channels per RF band is a fundamental process for many software defined radio platforms. These platforms typically employ a channelizer to extract channels from the received RF band for follow-on baseband processing, or to insert channels into the RF band for transmission. This paper will compare and contrast three of the more popular channelization techniques: Digital Down Conversion, Frequency Domain Filtering, and Polyphase FFT Filter Banks. The analysis begins by presenting a base architecture for a wideband transceiver, and then explores each channelization method within the context of this architecture. These include the computational complexity of the channelization approach, the applicability of the approach in supporting a given frequency plan, and processor selection for the proposed implementation.