QAM in Software Defined Radio for Vehicle Safety Application

Automobiles crashes are becoming a source of increasing social concern, which instigates government bodies to impose stringent requirements on vehicle safety. The development of the embedded intelligent safety system (ISS) platform is a difficult task and involves many factors such as generation and interconnection of the hardware that support the execution of software. A Software Defined Radio (SDR) replaces the traditional fixed hardware radio with a system that may be reconfigured, both during operation to provide greater flexibility and by providing software upgrades to add new capabilities without requiring new hardware. SDR is computer based systems that emulate the behavior of traditional radio systems by processing digitized signals. Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) has fast become the dominant modulation mechanism for high speed digital signals. With increases in processing power, QAM as a part of SDR schema is now easily achievable. This paper is based on signal-space concepts to efficiently evaluate the performance of QAM schemes over an additive white Gaussian noise channel. This high order modulation technique is compared with respect to bit-error rate (BER) for vehicle safety