Evaluation of Digital Codings on the SoC-based Software-Defined Radio for the Military Communication

Abstract

The modern military communication extensively utilizes radio spectrums to convey important information. Radio transceivers have evolved from large analog transceivers to miniature digital transceivers. Digital transceivers are relied on digital communication techniques, which include various digital codings and digital modulations. Digital codings are crucial processes in most digital communications. The outstanding advantages of digital codings are that it conserves channel bandwidth, and it makes information more robust. There are plenty of digital codings in military communications. Each coding is suitable for the specific application and environment. The implementation of various digital codings on one device is possible with a software defined radio (SDR), at which the transmission characteristics of a SDR can be defined by the software running on the device. Hence, a SDR can be reprogrammed to meet the require transmission characteristics. A logic parts of SDR can be implemented either by Digital Signal Processor (DSP) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). With the current semiconductor technology, both DSP and FPGA can be integrated into one chip, which is known as a System-on-Chip (SoC). This article evaluates the performance of the military digital codings on SoC as the digital processing unit. The result shows that SoC-based SDR can be a potential for SDR in the military communications