An Architecture for Software Defined Cognitive Radio

As we move forward towards the next generation of wireless pro-tocols, the push for a better radio physical layer is ever increasing. Conventional radio architectures are limited to narrow operating regions and fails to adapt with changing technology. This is fur-ther strengthened with the advent of cognitive radio, which needs a more versatile and flexible framework that is programmable within the timing constraints of a protocol. In this paper we present an architecture for Software Defined Cognitive Radio that caters to the specific baseband processing requirements in a changing environ-ment. We aim to provide more flexibility by de-constructing the radio pipeline into a framework of user controlled kernels that can be reconfigured at run-time. This architecture provides the bare-bones of a OFDM based radio physical layer that can adapt to per-form a varied number of tasks in different radio networks. We also present a novel message based real-time reconfiguration method to transmit and receive a wide range of waveforms used in concurrent wireless protocols