Terminal technologies through innovation
Among the significant changes that wireless communications have brought to our everyday lives are radio systems, especially Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems. This SDR technology allows a wide availability of channel modulation waveforms simply defined in software, which in this way provides increasing flexibility in communications. From military surveillance systems to commercial third generation base stations, this has become a core technology of the wireless industry. While most research efforts focus on the software by simplifying and reducing programming, this EC funded project has primarily concentrated on reconfigurable terminals. By integrating many systems within the same platform, reconfigurable terminals have the potential to offer significant user benefits, such as enhanced flexibility in ubiquitous communications. Moreover, they display capabilities for supporting almost any type of radio system, such as paging to cellular, numerous wireless network deployments, terrestrial to satellite, personal communications to broadcasting. For advancing reconfigurable terminals, extensive research has been conducted on spectrum sharing techniques, with primary concern technologies related to radio accessing and radio resource management. More specifically, the project satisfactorily addressed the problem of multi-source traffic (regular asymmetric and download), one of the key issues of SDR systems. This is expected to allow the delivery of sophisticated and robust mobile and wireless applications with compelling advantages for industries in today's highly competitive marketplace.