Transmission and Reception Front-End Algorithms for Software Defined Radio

We present low-complexity algorithms for transmitter and receiver front-end suited to the implementation of software defined radio (SDR) terminals. The proposed algorithms make the processing sampling frequency independent of the symbol rate of the digitally modulated signal and use the “IF-sampling” technique for D/A and A/D conversion. As a case-study, we consider a training-based joint multiuser channel estimation and we show that our front-end algorithms work nicely when coupled with an efficient FFT-based joint channel estimator. A real-time PC based SDR testbed with fully programmable Digital Signal Processors has been successfully implemented based upon the concepts illustrated in this paper.