Hoffman, M W

Stewart, R W

Weiss, S

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 2005:16, 2595–2597c  2005 Hindawi Publishing CorporationEditorialRobert W. StewartDepartment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XW, Scotland, UKEmail: r.stewart@eee.strath.ac.ukMichael W. HoffmanDepartment of Electrical Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0511, USAEmail: mhoﬀman1@unl.eduStephan WeissSchool of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UKEmail: s.weiss@ecs.soton.ac.ukIn the past years, digital signal processing (DSP) algorithmsand architectures for baseband communication systems havefuelled the delivery of applications such as 3G mobile com-munications and wireless LAN to mass markets. This wasmadepossiblebyatremendousgrowthintheperformanceofcomputational devices such as digital signal processors andFPGAs, as well as an increase in sampling rates of conver-sion devices to potentially several 100MHz. While the de-velopment of both computational devices and ADCs/DACscontinues, thus permitting DSP to be applied at IF samplingrates and possibly beyond, the opportunities for further en-hancing radio devices by DSP algorithms and architecturesarise.Against this background of development, anIEE/EURASIP conference on “DSP-Enabled Radio” washeld at the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) inLivingston, Scotland, in September 2003. This very livelyone-and-a-half-day event brought together 120 researchersfrombothindustry andacademiawithastronginternationalparticipation. It was the spirit of this DSP-Enabled Radioconference and the contributions therein that brought tolife the idea to this special issue. This issue contains bothcontributions from the event and responses to an open callfor papers.Naturally, the topic of signal processing for radio andcommunications admits a wide range of research. The pa-pers of which this special issue comprises ﬁrstly addressgeneral design approaches, tools, and methods to developDSP-based radio systems. A second group of papers reportson system implementations, which include devices runningon both dedicated hardware and PCs, and application ar-eas as diverse as multimedia and astronomy. A third groupdiscusses speciﬁc DSP algorithms which can be accommo-dated by communications systems based on digital process-ing platforms. A brief summary of the respective contribu-tions is presented below.GENERAL DESIGN APPROACHES AND TOOLSThe ﬁrst ﬁve papers address design issues, approaches, andtools related to complex communications systems. P. Be-lanovi´ c et al. address the problem of the design gap, andargue for automatic approaches to virtual prototyping. Theproposed scheme aims at a very short automated stage pro-ducing a virtual prototype, which outlines both the hard-and software of the ﬁnal design. Subsequently, in the ﬁnalstage of the design cycle, hard- and software implementationcan be performed concurrently, leading to a considerably re-duced overall design time. An example for a UMTS systemis provided. K. van Berkel et al. present an embedded vectorprocessor, which aims at integrating a large number of base-band DSP functions into a single architecture. The ﬂexibilityof this approach is demonstrated by a number of examplesacross various standards, including mobile and wireless, thatmay be operated on such a device. X. Rev´ es et al. discuss theimplementationofDSPradiofunctionsonvariousplatformsvia a hardware-independent abstraction layer, which oﬀersa common interface across the diﬀerent systems. Built onthis interface are three blocks which together can implementand execute radio functionality in real time. The paper by E.Senn et al. is concerned with estimating the power and en-ergy consumption of a DSP algorithm given in C-code whenexecutedonavarietyofcomputationalplatforms.Thismod-elling tool allows designers to consider the eﬀect of processor2596 EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processingand algorithm choice on the overall power consumption atan early stage in system design. Based on the analysis of sev-eral central communications functions such as scrambling,puncturing, and interleaving, S. H. Jeong et al. propose theinclusion of a dedicated functional unit to execute bit ma-nipulations into a digital signal processor. Results underlinethe beneﬁt of this approach through the ability to consider-ably reduce the number of clock cycles compared to a stan-dard digital signal processor if such a functional unit for bitmanipulations is employed.SYSTEMS AND HARDWAREThe next section of papers in this special issue report systemimplementations and speciﬁc hardware for reconﬁgurableradios. Of the ﬁrst three radio implementations, the paperby R. Schiphorst et al. presents a software-deﬁned radio sys-tem realised on a Pentium 4 processor platform equippedwith additional ADC and DAC functionality. The approachis interesting, since the proposed solution leaves the standardroute of dedicated processor platforms and moves to verycommonly available general-purpose processors, on whichboth Bluetooth and a HiperLAN/2 speciﬁcation are imple-mented and jointly operated. R. Mostafa et al. report on thearchitecture of their software-based MIMO prototype sys-tem, which implements space-time block coding and similarMIMO techniques. Their study is supported by channel andcapacity measurements using their system. An astronomicalapplication of a software-deﬁned radio system is discussed inthe paper by R. Weber et al. Motivated by the need for ac-curate power spectral density estimation in the astronomicradio spectrum corrupted by considerable levels of interfer-ence, they present the implementation of a powerful front-end platform and its application to resolve a speciﬁc astro-nomical radio source.The latter two papers in this section address system com-ponents. With respect to baseband processing, I. Barbieriet al. discuss a system-on-chip of a multimedia applicationexemplarily comprising of a video and speech coder. Thedesign focuses on the general design procedure of a hard-ware/software codesign and the reconﬁgurability of such asystem. On the RF side of the radio front-end, S.-H. Oh etal. introduce an antenna design which can be electronicallytuned towards various frequency bands. In their example,they demonstrate an antenna that can cover various GSM,DCS, and PCS bands with good narrowband characteristicsby controlling the antenna parameters from the basebanddigital signal processor.ALGORITHMS FOR DSP-ENABLED RADIOSThe remaining papers in this special issue discuss advancedsignalprocessingsolutions,whicharemotivated bytheavail-ability of a software-based radio system. The ﬁrst two pa-pers in this section address blind synchronisation and equal-isation in DSP-based transmission systems. M. Valkama etal. consider the synchronisation, equalisation, and carrieroﬀset compensation based on a blind source separationscheme applied to the inphase and quadrature componentsof the received signal, which is particularly aimed at di-rect conversion receivers. C. Tibenderana and S. Weiss ad-dress a Bluetooth receiver, which utilises the availability ofa high-performance computing platform required for wire-less LAN applications in order to obtain signiﬁcant increasesin quality when targeting Bluetooth. The performance ben-eﬁt could translate into an increase in the distance overwhich Bluetooth can operate, or into an increase in through-put.The last two papers utilise the availability of antennaarrays in the radio transceiver system. K. D. Le et al. in-vestigate the relative impacts of ﬁxed and adaptive process-ing using multiple receive antennas for a WLAN applicationusing OFDM modulation. The evaluation relies on a newthree-dimensional stochastic indoor propagation model. G.W.Riceetal.surveytheestimationandperformanceofa2D-RAKE receiver in a temporally and spatially dispersive fadingchannel.Bothcoherentandnoncoherentsolutionstoparam-eter tracking are proposed, and their beneﬁt from transmitdiversity investigated.ACKNOWLEDGMENTWe would like to thank all authors and reviewers for theircontributions and kind help in realising this special issue onDSP-Enabled Radio.Robert W. StewartMichael W. HoﬀmanStephan WeissRobert W. Stewart i sc u r r e n t l yaP r o f e s -sor in the Institute of Communicationsand Signal Processing at the University ofStrathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Heleads a team of researchers working var-iously in the areas of adaptive signal pro-cessing,DSPalgorithmsandarchitecturesfor wireless and mobile communications.HeisaMemberofEURASIP,theIEE,andthe IEEE.Michael W. Hoﬀman received the B.S. de-gree from Rice University, Houston, Texas,t h eM . S .d e g r e ef r o mt h eU n i v e r s i t yo fSouthern California, Los Angeles, and thePh.D. degree from the University of Min-nesota, all in electrical engineering. From1985to1988,hewasasignalprocessingsys-tem engineer in the Space CommunicationsDivision, TRW Inc. In 1993, he joined theUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln, where hecurrently serves as an Associate Professor. His research interests in-clude data compression, joint source-channel coding, and sensorarray processing.Editorial 2597Stephan Weiss received the Dipl.-Ing. de-gree from the University of Erlangen-N¨ urnberg,Erlangen,Germany,in1995,andthe Ph.D. degree from the University ofStrathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, in 1998,both in electronic and electrical engineer-ing.In1999,hejoinedtheCommunicationsResearch Group within the School of Elec-tronics and Computer Science at the Uni-versity of Southampton, where he is a Se-nior Lecturer. Prior to this appointment he held a Visiting Lecture-ship at the University of Strathclyde. In 1996/1997, he was a Visit-ing Scholar at the University of Southern California. His researchinterests are mainly in adaptive and array signal processing, multi-rate systems, and signal expansions, with applications in commu-nications, audio, and biomedical signal processing. For his workin biomedical signal processing, he was a corecipient of the 2001Research Award of the German Society on Hearing Aids. He is aMember of the VDE and EURASIP, a Senior Member of the IEEE,and a Member of the IEE Signal Processing Professional NetworkExecutive Team.

Editorial: Special Issue on DSP Enabled Radio

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