Software-defined radio technology gets go-ahead
Janos Gereben - www.the451.com
[Startups and major telecom companies are now free to produce
equipment that is reprogrammable for use on multiple frequencies.]
After an industry and regulatory-agency debate going on for years, the
Federal Communications Commission has now adopted rule changes to
allow deployment of a new generation of radio equipment known as
software-defined radios (SDRs). This equipment, long developed and
refined but not authorized until now for commercial use in the US, can
be quickly reprogrammed to transmit and receive on multiple
frequencies in different transmission formats.
Besides its other features and advantages, SDRs reprogramming
capability alone could change the way users communicate across
wireless services and promote more efficient use of radio spectrum,
advocates say. In a software-defined radio, functions that were
formerly carried out solely in hardware - such as the generation of
the transmitted radio signal and the tuning of the received radio
signal - are performed by software. Thus the radio is programmable,
able to transmit and receive over a wide range of frequencies, while
emulating virtually any desired transmission format.
Prominent former FCC officials and associated scientists - including
chairman William Kennard, Dale Hatfield, David Farber, and Dewayne
Hendricks - have all supported action enabling SDR development in
order to find more economic and intelligent use of available spectrum.
On the other side were aviation and telco-run telecommunication
interests, resisting the move towards SDR licensing.
Moving with unusual speed in recent months, the FCC bridged the gap
from last December's Notice of Proposed Rule Making on SDRs to today's
authorization for the technology by altering Part 2 of the FCC Rules.
Awaiting the decision were scores of SDR Forum member companies,
including Aeronix, Agilent, Altera, Boeing, Cingular and other
wireless providers, Conexant, companies associated with the US
Department of Defense, France Telecom, Fujitsu, General Dynamics,
Hitachi, Intel, Kyocera, many others.
Under the FCC rules adopted last Friday, software modifications in an
SDR can be made through a "permissive change," which has a streamlined
filing process. The FCC identification number will not have to be
changed, so equipment in the field will not have to be re-labeled -
although changes can be obtained only by the original grantee of the
equipment authorization. To allow for changes to equipment by other
parties such as software developers, the Commission will permit an
optional "electronic label" for software-defined radios, in which the
FCC identification number could be displayed on an LCD or similar
screen.
The regulatory holdup in the US has handicapped developers in this
country while SDR research and development went on vigorously in
Europe, Asia and Australia. The Swedish-English-Israeli company
Digital Mobility, for example, developed a powerful WAP browser
through an SDR tool, which automatically detects WAP, Java or i-mode,
to configure the browser accordingly. Sony's Computer Science
Laboratories produced a working SDR prototype back in April, using its
Software Programmable and Hardware Reconfigurable Architecture for
Network. SOPRANO 1.0 implements modulation, demodulation and other
basic radio functions in software, allowing single units to support
multiple radio protocols.