
RADIO SOFTWARE FOR MAC SOFTWARE
Software Radio (or Software Defined Radio, SDR) holds the promise of fully programmable wireless communication systems, effectively supplanting current technologies that have the lowest communication layers implemented primarily in fixed, custom hardware circuits.

The lack of flexibility and programmability makes experimental research in wireless communication become very difficult, especially for research groups in academics.

It is also fixed, and therefore, once it is delivered, it cannot be changed or upgraded. Designing ASIC is costly, both economically and time-wise. In conventional wireless communication systems, the critical lower layer processing, that is, the physical layer (PHY) and medium access control (MAC), is typically implemented in hardware (ASIC chips), due to the high-computational and real-time requirements.
RADIO SOFTWARE FOR MAC PC
PC does have the advantage of a familiar environment with rich programming tools and ecosystem supports, but meeting the astronomical demands of signal processing in PC software and in real-time seems quite “mission impossible” to many people. We choose commodity PC as the underlying platform. There are many ways of building high-performance software radios. This is a significant challenge for any software radio. The implementation platform must then be able to handle OFDM, 64QAM, MIMO, CSMA, 40MHz channel width, and tens to hundreds Mbps data rate.

In late 2000s and early 2010s, the state-of-the-art is Wi-Fi and LTE. The goal of Sora is to develop the most advanced software radio that is capable of implementing the state-of-the-art wireless communication technology easily and efficiently. The Microsoft Research Software Radio (Sora) is one such recent success in advancing the state of the art in software radio technology. Over the years, researchers and engineers have made remarkable progress and have been constantly pushing the hardware-software boundary. Software radio (or software-defined radio, SDR) is an engineering pursue in wireless communication technology field that one day all wireless signal processing functions, which are typically implemented in hardware today, will be done completely in software.
