Concept and design of a cognitive radio prototyping platform

The increasing demand for higher data rates in communication systems requires an efficient utilization of the limited frequency spectrum resource. Therefore, cognitive radio aspects are of utmost interest. The authors propose a reconfigurable cognitive radio platform which combines the advantages of the flexibility of a digital signal processor with the efficient parallelization capabilities of a field-programmable gate array. Since the ever increasing computational complexity complicates the dimensioning of such platforms, scalability and modularity was a crucial design constraint for the presented concept.