SDR in Commercial Wireless Infrastructure
Aditya Kaul, ABI Research

The use of SDR in commercial wireless infrastructure, namely base stations has been largely restricted to providing software upgrades within a given family of standards. There have been differing opinions on whether this can be termed SDR, as most software upgrades use a firmware approach involving FPGAs/DSPs essentially locking software to hardware. In addition, the RF portion of the base station has been always hardware controlled. However, there is a noticeable shift in the base station market, with SDR being a prominent marketing feature in upcoming multimode base station models that can support multiple standards, across varying standard families using RF heads that are partially software controlled. Although this trend is likely to benefit the SDR community as a whole, there is still a larger issue of the business case for SDR base stations, as long as the decoupling between hardware and software does not happen. Although top-tier vendors continue to be against any decoupling, there has been an acceptance of the increasing ratio of software as compared to hardware. At the same time emerging markets like India are moving aggressively towards promoting active infrastructure sharing amongst mobile operators. Vendors like Vanu who support the decoupled concept in base stations expect to see traction in such emerging markets, which is likely to accelerate and maybe disrupt the traditional tightly coupled model that is preferred by top-tier vendors. In essence, the use of SDR in base stations is expected to see an exponential growth in the coming few years, with increasing competition between the firmware led approach and the non-firmware approach, with mobile operators playing a key role in determining who succeeds.

Aditya Kaul is Senior Analyst on Mobile Networks for ABI Research and is leading the Emerging Wireless Technologies Practice for Pioneer. Aditya brings hands-on engineering skills with two Masters degrees in Electrical and Industrial Engineering, and his past work at QualComm and Siemens. Aditya also has extensive experience as an analyst, both as an independent consultant and as a team leader for a wireless analyst group at Evalueserve. Aditya is frequently invited to chair conferences, moderate panel sessions, conduct workshops and contribute to press articles. Currently, Aditya is actively involved with the SDR Forum in identifying and promoting commercial applications of SDR worldwide.