Applications of Distributed Architectures in Software Defined Radio and Dynamic Spectrum Access

reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. This thesis is a collection of five papers preceded by an overview part which summarizes them, puts the results reported on into perspective and contains some further related re-sults. The papers relate to three research goals which are all within emerging radio systems technology: Software Defined Radio (SDR), Cognitive Radio (CR) and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA). The dominant focus is on the intersection between radio technology and distributed processing technology. The research goals aim to contribute to the evolution from inflexible transceivers with pre-regulated frequency-use to flexible software-defined transceivers capable of dynamically exploiting the available radio spectrum. SDR is frequently viewed as an enabler for Cognitive Radio and Dynamic Spectrum Access systems, in providing a technology basis for dynamically reconfigurable radio nodes. However, although it has been an active research topic for nearly two decades, the adoption of SDR into products has been much slower than anticipated, and many of the initial goals of SDR have not been met. This situation motivated the first main research goal of analyzin