Tutorials on Software Defined Radio and Cognitive Radios

(Including an end to end communication system demo on FPGA platform)

Tutorial 1

Evolving field of Green Communication

1 hour

Continuous research and innovation in communication systems field over decades, resulted in present day advanced mobile, WiMax, Wi-Fi solutions. However the massive usage of energy in communication sector has led to concerns about environmental friendliness. This motivates researchers to find greener methods of implementing communication systems. Green Communication methods aim is to reduce overall energy consumption within framework of optimizing system capacity and maintaining user Quality of Service. The study of green communications will require investigation in many areas such as power efficient RF hardware, efficient MAC protocols, networking, and integration of renewable energy with communications equipment, frequency reuse deployment strategies, and spectrum policy. This session shall introduce the fundamental design strategies which support green communication.

Tutorial 2

Moving from Software defined radio and Cognitive radio

1.5 hour

The research on software defined radio resulted in several digital friendly architectures for realizing the communication system blocks. The adaptive nature and configurability of SDR approach is exploited by both defense and commercial sectors to achieve covert and high performance communication. The mathematical research on Cognition triggered Cognitive Radio (CR) field which aims to bring more advantages on top of SDR. The capability of dynamic spectrum shifting of SDR can be considered as one of the major capability, which made designers to evolve CR. At present several researchers are aiming to evolve the CR frame work to establish efficient spectrum utilization and hence to bring down the service costs. This session shall introduce the concepts of both SDR and CR and highlights core research areas, while explaining open problems in these fields.

Tutorial 3

Practical issues in Designing communication systems Software/Hardware

1 hour

The design of software defined radios (SDRs) broadly has two options; Software based (processors) and Hardware based (FPGA/ASIC). A common set of techniques are required to realize SDR algorithms on both these platforms. However the architecture and coding issues differ among software and hardware options. To realize a complete communication system on practical hardware the designer needs to have knowledge on communication algorithms, digital architectures, number systems and related EDA tools. This session shall explain with a case study the practical aspects in realizing the communication system on both the platforms. Tutorial 4

Developing and testing algorithms for communication system in hardware using System Generator

2 hour

(Include demo of complete MODEM on FPGA hardware) The gap between MATLAB based algorithm modeling & simulation and FPGA/ASIC implementation is the first barrier for communication system developers. The conventional VHDL/Verilog design and test methodologies for algorithms fail beyond some level of complexity. The emulation of practical test signal conditions for communication blocks and verification of algorithm under such conditions is mandatory to verify the robustness of algorithms. This session aims to explain the design flow with Xilinx System Generator to develop the communication system blocks. A step by step approach to build a working example will be demonstrated. The hardware in loop verification shall also be demonstrated with practical test signals being generated from PC. The Xilinx FPGA board shall be used for this demonstration.