Wireless Innovation Forum approves two new reports

WASHINGTON, USA: The Wireless Innovation Forum (SDR Forum version 2.0), a non-profit organization dedicated to driving the future of radio communications and systems worldwide, announced the approval of two reports prepared by its members.

The reports, “Commercial Baseband Technology Overview: The Current State of Technology Development and Future Directions” and “Use Cases for Cognitive Applications in Public Safety Communications Systems Volume 2: Chemical Plant Explosion Scenario,” were prepared by the group’s Commercial Baseband Processing Technologies Work Group (CBPT-WG) and Public Safety Special Interest Group (PS-SIG), respectively.

“Reports, recommendations and specification produced by our members have had and will continue to have a significant impact on the advanced wireless community as a whole.”

The report produced by the members of the CBPT-WG addresses both programming environments and hardware platforms for Software Defined Radio (SDR). SDR technology has developed rapidly in recent years. Semiconductor process improvements following Moore’s Law have made low power, low cost devices available that are suitable for commercial deployments. With such advancement, designs have been introduced for a range of both infrastructure and handset user equipment that use SDR techniques.

As technologies continue to converge, this report finds that SDR designs offer elegant and reusable methods of implementing worldwide communications coverage. The report is a snapshot of commercial state-of-the-art SDR implementations ranging from programming environments, programmable processors, and FPGA technologies.

Dr. John Glossner, CTO of Sandbridge Technologies, Forum board member and co-author of the report, said: “I’m very pleased to have had such broad participation on this, our first work product. The document should serve as a reference that in the commercial handset domain SDR is moving from early adopters to everyday usage – further confirming the technical and economic benefits of SDR designs.”

The document provides representative examples of platforms available and programming techniques. In the first section, Etherstack presents their programming methodology for SDR development. Next, three processor-based SDRs and their programming environments are presented. In section two, IMEC discusses the ADRES processor. In section three, Sandbridge discusses the SB3500 MPSoC. In section four, St-Ericsson (formerly NXP) discusses the EVP processor. In the final section, Xilinx discusses FPGA-based SDRs.

The report produced by the PS-SIG outlines a hypothetical scenario of a major explosion at a chemical plant in a mid-sized metropolitan area. The scenario was developed with input from public safety practitioners, communications system engineers, and radio developers.

It provides the basis (events, activities, and timelines) required to analyze the impact of cognitive-based radio and network functions on first responder communications and mission effectiveness. Based on the analysis, the group concludes that the utilization of cognitive radio functions can dramatically increase the ability of Incident Commanders to meet their mission objectives.

“By using a realistic scenario incorporating public safety practitioner input, the analysis in this report is grounded in real public safety needs,” said Fred Frantz, of L-3 Communications and chair of the PS-SIG. “The public safety community can see the benefit of this emerging technology and begin to think in terms of the eventual impact to their operations.”

The report provides eight examples (defined as use cases) of how cognitive radio or network technology could be utilized, and explains in detail the technical, regulatory, and operational procedure developments required to make these capabilities available for public safety use. It also showcases the potential for improving first responders' communications capabilities through the application of cognitive functionality. The report can be found here.

“These two reports are representative of the high quality work products under development by the Forum’s members,” says Lee Pucker, CEO of the Wireless Innovation Forum. “Reports, recommendations and specification produced by our members have had and will continue to have a significant impact on the advanced wireless community as a whole.”