FOUND IN TRANSLATION

When they assemble for their next meeting, scheduled for Jan. 22-24 in Los Angeles, the member companies of the Software Defined Radio Forum should have plenty to talk about — and at least a couple of milestones to celebrate.

That's because SDR is finally beginning to get some notice in the public wireless network universe. While broad incorporation of SDR into network equipment and handsets may still be a long way off, it's at least being acknowledged as something more significant and more widely applicable than its humble origins as a military niche innovation would suggest.

“It used to have the rap that it was just a defense industry solution,” said Bo Piekarski, vice president of business development at TelASIC.

In fact, if the technology continues to mature and finds a home in large wireless networks, it wouldn't be outrageous to propose that SDR may one day bring an end to the air interface protocol differences that have often served as battle lines during the industry's first 20 years of existence.

“It would be great for every carrier to be able to provision a base station as, for example, 20% GSM traffic, 30% CDMA and 50% TDMA, and then be able to change all that in a year by changing the software,” said Al Margulies, chief operating officer of the Software-Defined Radio Forum.

In software-defined network equipment, such as base stations, costly hardware components could be replaced by flexible and easily upgradeable software components. Applying SDR technology to handsets would sharply decrease the cost of manufacturing handsets. Also, the ability to remotely configure these handsets via software downloads would save operators and handset vendors the expense of recalls to fix glitches, while granting users the power to quickly customize their own handsets with new services.

While broad worldwide use of SDR to solve air interface complexities and other problems may be several years off, what's very clear right now is that SDR finally has the small commercial foothold that developers of the technology long had been seeking. Just last month, Mid-Tex Cellular, a rural carrier serving parts of Texas, committed to what is believed to be the first commercial deployment of SDR technology in a U.S. public wireless network.

In Mid-Tex Cellular's case, the small carrier started with TDMA technology, wants to migrate to GSM to support data, but would save great expense if it could operate both protocols in different markets for the time being.

The deal was the result of a field trial that lasted several months and was closely monitored by many larger carriers, according to Vanu Bose, founder and CEO of Vanu, the SDR technology developer that supplied Mid-Tex with software to run on Hewlett-Packard servers to effectively create software-defined base stations.

Because Mid-Tex, Vanu, Hewlett-Packard and other vendors involved in the trial — including ADC — began the field test without having a preliminary period of lab trials, the field test gained the notoriety of a high-wire act. Bose said one major carrier sent a team of nearly a dozen people to the test site to gather information.

“The success of the trial proved SDR is a viable solution for rural carriers, but it also proved it was something worth looking into by larger carriers,” Bose said.

As the trial carried on a few months ago, the SDR Forum decided to go a step further to monitor changing carrier attitudes about SDR and launched the SDR Forum Operator Requirements Market Study, chaired by Piekarski, a former Ericsson executive with many connections and relationships in the carrier arena.

Piekarski presented the forum's carrier members, a growing list that currently includes Cingular Wireless, Orange and others, with a survey of 35 questions asking about market requirements, SDR's place in their network evolutions and other issues. Piekarski also has surveyed non-member carriers that have shown interest in SDR, such as AT&T Wireless, as well as carriers of various sizes.

Currently, Piekarski is waiting for answers to a handful of questions that were revised with the help of forum carrier members. The answers may be discussed, in fact, at the upcoming forum meeting in Los Angeles. But so far, one of the most notable trends in the survey results is that carriers are indicating they're “very interested in seeing SDR in handsets as a first area of focus,” Piekarski said.

It had been thought that SDR handsets could lie further off in the future because of the long product development processes they require and other priorities for the major handset vendors. But Piekarski said he hoped the survey results help change those priorities.

If SDR comes to the forefront of the carrier community soon, it will have been a long time coming.

SDR FORUM CARRIER MEMBERS

Cingular Wireless Sprint NTT NTT DoCoMo Orange SK Telecom TeliaSonera Telefonica

SDR technology was first developed in response to different branches of the military having different architectural requirements for their mobile communications systems, said the SDR Forum's Margulies. While they had different kinds of systems operating on isolated frequency bands, the ability to coordinate communication, particularly in the field of battle, was essential. Outside the military, public safety agencies faced — and continue to face — the same challenges.

In the mid-1990s, the companies that had been innovating with SDR technology for the military and other niche markets began to look for ways to inform the broader public about the benefits of the technology.

“They wanted to get the information about SDR out there and figure out the requirements for public network implementation,” Margulies said.

SDR innovators saw public network operators, particularly those in the U.S., as another group in need of network interoperability solutions. The first commercial deployment of SDR happening in the U.S. is an anomaly for an industry in which major technology adoptions tend to migrate from east to west, with U.S. carriers and consumers generally being the last ones to deploy and use groundbreaking solution.

However, the U.S. mobile industry's nurturance of a multiprotocol melting pot that includes GSM, CDMA and TDMA networks is what made it the perfect proving ground for SDR. This situation, while reflecting the country's free-market economic ways, also has encouraged a national patchwork of different network standards that has affected service reliability and forced carriers into an expensive cycle of hardware upgrades to offer new services. It also has necessitated the development of complex roaming agreements between carriers.

The challenge of educating a new industry full of many decision-makers at many levels led to the creation of the SDR Forum in 1996. The group is interested in promoting SDR, creating interoperability and contributing to regulatory proceedings.

One such regulatory proceeding — and another milestone in the efforts of SDR technology developers to get on the public agenda — was the decision last month by the Federal Communications Commission to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Order on Cognitive and Software-Defined Radio Technologies. Though the FCC approved guidelines for the introduction of SDR products to the marketplace more than two years ago, last month's rulemaking furthers its efforts to foster the development of the SDR market by opening public comment on how the technology specifically can be used in networks.

“It gets us closer to our goal, which is to get a common set of regulatory principals put forth that identify SDR as a problem-solving technology for which software downloads should be legalized,” said Margulies.

With this level of activity, it might seem a wonder that large carriers and their vendors didn't jump on the SDR bandwagon sooner. However, as Margulies said, “Large carriers can't go in and replace existing hardware with new software all at once, and even if one of them does, the large infrastructure vendors can't turn around and change their whole plan to SDR based on what a single carrier wants. It will take time.”

While it could take several years before SDR network are widely implemented and SDR handsets are broadly available, a more timely arrival could help not only improve networks, but possibly influence the course of corporate strategy at the highest levels. For instance, much-anticipated industry consolidation is expected to begin this year, and deployment of SDR could lessen network protocol similarities and differences as a factor in who buys whom.

“Certainly, there are technology integration issues that come to the fore in such deals,” Piekarski said. “If a smaller company were to be acquired by Verizon, SDR would help mitigate the problems of integration.”