ITSY Handheld Software Radio

Software radio technology promises to eliminate existing radio interoperability problems, provide a path for rapidly incorporating advances in digital communications, and enable new applications and waveforms that take advantage of the tremendous flexibility. However, the current state of low power processing technology limits application to low power handheld radios. A handheld software radio platform would enable the construction of devices that could inter-operate with multiple legacy systems, download new waveforms and be used to construct adhoc networks that optimize the physical layer for the current conditions. Low power operation is the most significant challenge facing software radio. While some approaches sacrifice considerable flexibility by using technologies such as re-configurable logic, we believe that the advances in processor power management will make a pure software radio approach feasible in a handset in 3-5 years. A prototype handheld software radio based on the 200 MHz StrongARM processor was designed and fabricated under this contract, and several representative waveforms were ported to the platform. This work enabled us to evaluate the capabilities handheld software radio based on existing processor technology, and provides benchmarks that can be used to assess the capabilities of software radio systems based on future lowpower processors.