Terminal-centric view of software. reconfigurable system architecture and enabling components and technologies

Reconfigurable radio in Europe is rapidly gaining momentum and becoming a key enabler for realizing the vision of being optimally connected anywhere, anytime. At the center of this exciting technology is the reconfigurable terminal that will move across different radio access networks, adapting at every instant to an optimum mode of operation. This will require coordinated reconfiguration management support from both the terminal and the network, but the terminal will inherit a significant part of this intelligence. This article focuses on a novel reconfigurable terminal architecture that advances the state of the art and encompasses the overall protocol stack from the physical to application layer in IP-based radio access networks. The proposed architecture is composed of a terminal reconfiguration management part and enabling middleware technologies like the complementary Distributed Processing Environment and agent platforms, flexible protocol stacks that can flexibly be interchanged to support different wireless technologies and associated mechanisms, and finally, object-oriented reconfigurable RF and baseband components. The work presented in this article is conducted in the context of the IST projects SCOUT (www.ist-scout.org) and TRUST (www4.in.tum.de/-scout/trust webpage_src/ trust frameset.html) of the European 5th Framework Program.