Radio technology has come a long way in the last few years. The hardware-based radios of the past are quickly being converted into sophisticated programmable systems that can even adapt to the prevailing RF environment to take advantage of unused spectrum. Several recent articles cover some of the aspects of creating these programmable radio sets.

The first of these lays the groundwork as to what Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is all about. The SDR forum has a quite extensive amount of information that is more detailed, but this article is a good start for those who are interested.

There is also a report on the NSA validation of a Harris-designed SDR set. This is no mean feat, since any flexibility in communications implies potential security weaknesses. The fact that the NSA is willing to bless any SDR at all is a combination of the robustness of the implementation and the will of the U.S. military to get the NSA to even consider this new technology. Trust me, getting them to even consider validating anything as radical as SDR is a major accomplishment.

The final article is a very interesting note on the use of game theory to assure convergence in these dynamic networks when they take the step into adaptive behavior. This is one of those problems that seems simple until you start considering the obscure corner cases. Use of game theory is an intriguing method for analyzing the solution space.

This technology has been primarily promoted by the military, but there are also serious possibilities in a number of commercial systems. This is another step in the maturation of radio technology and the creation of truly robust wireless communications.

Larry Mittag