Implementation of a reconfigurable soft radio using the layered radio architecture

Recent advances in reconfigurable computing have now made it possible to implement the concept of hardware paging, which has the potential to greatly advance the design of soft radios. While many soft/software radio architectures have been suggested and implemented, there remains a lack of a formal design methodology that can be used to design and implement these radios on reconfigurable platforms that exploit the latest inventions. This paper presents a unified architecture, called the Layered Radio Architecture, for design of soft radios on a reconfigurable platform. Using the assumptions of the availability of run-time reconfigurable hardware and the use of stream-based computing, the layered radio architecture defines a soft radio architecture that is scalable in hardware and software, flexible, and capable of supporting multi-mode radios along with over-the-air updates and software validation.