Software Defined Radio for PC to PC Data Communication

Abstract

A combination of hardware and software technologies where some or all of the radios operating functions are implemented through adjustable software or firmware operating on programmable processing technologies is defined as Software Defined Radio (SDR). The basic concept of SDR is that the radio functions are configured by software and number of areas can be covered by using same platform. As software is used, configurations can be changed according to various radio functions which are not captured by classic radio. The tasks to be performed included the channels configuration, the management of the data transfer between two PC, the baseband data modulation and demodulation, and the data organization into packets solely by software. For the physical layer of this system Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is chosen as the transmission multiplexing method. This choice has been made because of the advantages that OFDM has better channel capacity and provides larger data rates. In this paper, simple IR circuit is used as SDR platform. This IR circuit work as a transceiver which can transmit text, number or image from one PC to another PC. In order to verify the proper functionality of the communication scheme, the received data streams are further analyzed with the use of MATLAB.