Abstract
Software Defined Radio (SDR) has been largely confined to defense markets until now and its adoption in the commercial market has been hindered by factors such as the lack of business case, the exorbitant costs of commercially developing the technology and the lack of a commercially viable development architecture to build upon. There have also been technical challenges, such as the inability of the RF/Analog ends to handle a wide spectrum of frequencies.
However, Pioneer sees SDR being increasingly used as a marketing tool by many commercial wireless equipment vendors, with most vendors confining the meaning of SDR to 'software reconfigurability' or the ability to provide 'software based upgrades'. Pioneer terms these base stations as ‘partially upgradeable' base stations. In the past few years SDR has also found increasing usage in WiMAX base stations, something that has helped to widen its reach in the commercial wireless marketplace.
On the other hand, Pioneer believes that SDR is a technology that has a wider appeal to the commercial wireless market. Going forward, SDR's role will become clearer and much more prominent as multiple air interface standards compete for the highly sought after emerging broadband wireless technologies marketplace, with no clear winner as yet in sight.
In such a scenario, SDR is seen as an enabler for ‘multiprotocol multiband' (MPMB) support in commercial base stations. Pioneer views the period around 2010 as a key inflection point for MPMB SDR. This is because of the emergence of advanced wireless standards of LTE, UMB and Mobile WiMAX, all of which are based on OFDM and contain synergies although they originate from different standard families. The period around 2010 also fits well with the technology advances that are occurring within SDR, especially on the RF/Analog front end. MPMB support is already being introduced by traditional SDR vendors as well as by 'top tier' base station OEMs and will continue to evolve as wireless operators begin to take advantage of the synergies between various wireless standards rather than restrict themselves to a particular standard family.
Thus, the period between 2007-17 is going to be a crucial period for MPMB SDR to evolve and be adopted in the commercial market. This brand new report from Pioneer Consulting is the first in a series of market research reports that focuses on the transition of SDR from defense to commercial markets and aims to identify the overall commercial SDR market opportunity. With the first report focusing on SDR in commercial base stations, the second report focuses on SDR in commercial small form-factor devices like picocells and mobile handsets.v
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