Environment-Adaptable Efficient Optimization for Programming of Reconfigurable Radio Frequency (RF) Receivers

Software defined radio has been developed for supporting multi-standard radio receivers, but remains vulnerable to interference. In order to overcome this interference challenge, this paper proposes replacing the fixed wide-band Radio Frequency (RF) front-end in software radio receivers with a reconfigurable RF front-end. We show that a software radio with an optimally chosen reconfigurable RF front-end outperforms fixed RF software radios, when the latter suffers from inter-modulation of blockers caused by non-linearity of its RF front-end. Moreover, we propose a fast optimization algorithm for selecting an optimal configuration of the reconfigurable RF front-end in radio environments with interference. This algorithm selects from among the available configurations of the RF front-end, and improves SINR by adapting to the blockers present, while requiring only a small number of trials to select the appropriate configuration. Thus, a reconfigurable RF front-end, when used in conjunction with a software radio, can effectively realize the development of multi-standard wireless communication systems.