Software radio architecture: A mathematical perspective

As the software radio makes its transition from research to practice, it be comes increasingly important to establish provable properties of the softwa re radio architecture on which product developers and service providers can base technology insertion decisions. Establishing provable properties requ ires a mathematical perspective on the software radio architecture. This pa per contributes to that perspective by critically reviewing the fundamental concept of the software radio, using mathematical models to characterize t his rapidly emerging technology in the context of similar technologies like programmable digital radios. The software radio delivers dynamically defin ed services through programmable processing capacity that has the mathemati cal structure of the Turing machine. The bounded recursive functions, a sub set of the total recursive functions, are shown to be the largest class of Turing-computable functions for which software radios exhibit provable stab ility in plug-and-play scenarios. Understanding the topological properties of the software radio architecture promotes plug-and-play applications and cost-effective reuse. Analysis of these topological properties yields a lay ered distributed virtual machine reference model and a set of architecture design principles for the software radio. These criteria may be useful in d efining interfaces among hardware, middleware, and higher level software co mponents that are needed for cost-effective software reuse.