Transmission and reception front-end architectures for software radio

We present low-complexity algorithms for transmitter and receiver front-end suited to the implementation of Software Radio (SR) terminals. The proposed algorithms make the processing sampling frequency independent of thesymbol 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 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 SR testbed with fully programmable Digital Signal Processors(DSP) has been successfully implemented based upon the concepts illustrated in this paper.