A software radio design approach for heterogeneous wireless access protocol transceivers

A study on the design of heterogeneous transceivers using the software radio approach is presented. The objective of the study is to extend the research on software radio towards the design of multi-protocol transceivers which can communicate between two or more heterogeneous wireless access technologies. A critical overview of some of the current multi- protocol software radio devices is presented. This is then followed by a proposal for a dual band WiFi/WiMAX transceiver based on software radio techniques. This design incorporates a multiband antenna as well as an RF WiFi/WiMAX mode switch which uses the WiFi received signal strength (RSS) to perform handover between the underlying WiFi and WiMAX networks