SMI International Software Radio Conference, 2010

- report on the SMI International Software Radio Conference 2010 held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in London where Dr Joe Mitola was a keynote speaker.

Software defined radio technology as well as other related developments including Cognitive Radio are now starting to be used in many areas both commercial and military. To provide insight into what is happening and the technology behind the developments, SMI organise their annual "International Software Radio Conference."

This year the International Software Radio Conference 2010 was held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in St James London. The hotel provided an impressive backdrop for the International Software Radio Conference which was held over two days on 7th and 8th June with a further workshop day on the 9th June 2010.

There was an impressive line-up of speakers to give their presentations on a variety of topics detailing the development of Software Radio and Cognitive Radio technology in various areas of the military industry.

International Software Radio Conference Programme

The programme for the International Software Radio Conference focussed mainly on the military developments being undertaken in the software radio and cognitive radio arenas. However many elements were still applicable to the commercial environment because many of the basic challenges remain the same.

There were a number of presentations that detailed information about various ongoing projects, giving a review of the progress in the projects. Some were from Europe, while others were from North America.

In addition to this a number of presentations were given about the way the software defined radio and cognitive radio technology is moving forwards.

Andrew Watson, Vice President and Technical Director of the Object Management Group provided a software defined radio standards overview detailing how standardised interfaces and design tools can be used for SDR and other complex systems.

Another major area of interest was the use of SCA - the Software Communications Architecture. This cropped up in many presentations. With waveforms costing considerable sums of money to develop, it is necessary to ensure that the maximum amount of re-use is gained by allowing several projects to use the same waveform. In addition to this it is necessary to be able to port software from one platform to another as old platforms become obsolete. A further requirement is that the same waveform is used across several products from different manufacturers to ensure interoperability. Although SCA is not the only answer, it helps enable these aims to be achieved.

In view of this the approaches to the use of SCA were discussed at length as well as the development of SCA from release 2.2.2. to what is now being termed SCA-Next.

Other presentations looked at the overall problem of waveform portability and described ideas for using SCA and other techniques to provide the optimum waveform portability.

Further presentations looked at the operation of cognitive radio networks and discussed the overall loop stability and methods of ensuring that any cognitive radio systems remained stable in the presence of large numbers of signals.

Joseph Mitola presented his keynote entitled: "The future of Cognitive Radio - Challenges and Opportunities." In this keynote, Dr Mitola looked at the evolution of Cognitive Radio, cognitive radio system-on-chip (SoC) architectures and also what is called Cognitive Linguistics in which software can be re-engineered to enable the source code to be re-used.

Summary

The International Software Radio Conference was ably chaired by Dr Phil Wite from PA Consulting. Not only did he provide additional insight into some areas but he kept the conference to time, and also chaired the discussion on transfer of SDR technologies between the commercial and military sectors.

The International Software Radio Conference 2010 provided an overview of some of the latest developments in Software Radio, Cognitive Radio and a number of associated areas such as SCA, the Software Communications Architecture and CORBA the middleware software. As such the conference enabled many interested parties to come together and hear about the latest developments and network in a pleasant atmosphere and surroundings.