Next-generation mobile communications are likely to employ different techniques and standards. The implementation in software of as many receiver functionalities as possible appears to be the most effective solution for coping with the multiplicity of communications alternatives. The concept of software radio, dating back to 1991, originally attracted commercial interest owing to the possibility that transmission layer functions could be fully software-defined. The same approach can be extended to protocols of the higher layers too, thus conceiving a programmable hardware to implement the functionalities of several layers of protocols by resident software or software downloaded from the network. Consisting of selected technical contributions to the Workshop on "Software Radio", this volume deals with state-of-the-art surveys of the enabling technologies and the prospective services of software radio implementations for future mobile communications.
Original and state-of-the-art research and development is presented in fields such as:
- Software radio for universal wireless internet access
- Software radio for multimedia communications
- Software radio architecture
- Network architecture, protocols and services
- Software radio technology towards pervasive appliance.
This volume on software radio is a valuable reference for both researchers and telecommunications professionals.

1 Software Radio for Universal Wireless Internet Access.- Bluetooth: "Last Meter" Technology for Nomadic Wireless Internetting.- The Pitfalls of Proxy Mechanisms Outside of the Research Domain.- Analysis of File Transfer Protocol Over Bluetooth Radio Link.- Role of Software Defined Radio in Wireless Access to the Internet.- Energy/Latency/Image Quality Tradeoffs in Enabling Mobile Multimedia Communication.- An Efficient Network Protocol for Virtual Worlds Browsing.- 2 Software Radio for Multimedia Communications.- Software Radio is Walking into Implementation Stage.- Capacity Considerations on the Uplink of a Multi-user DMT OFDMA System Impaired by Time Misalignments and Frequency Offsets.- A Software Radio Platform for New Generations of Wireless Communication Systems.- Adaptive Access Scheme Selection in Software-Based Wireless Multimedia Communications.- Distribution of Intelligence and Radio Link Configurability in Wireless Video-based Surveillance Networks.- Digital Receiver Architecture for Multi-Standard Software Defined Radios.- 3 Software Radio Architecture.- SDR Architecture for US Tactical Radios.- A Multiband, Multirole and Multimode Suited Radio Architecture.- Software Radio Implementability of Wireless LANs.- JCIT, a Production-Ready Field Tested Non-Proprietary Software Definable Radio.- Parameter Representations for Baseband Processing of 2G and 3G Mobile Communications Systems.- Digital Compensation in IF Modulated Upconversion Software Radio Architecture.- 4 Software Radio Technology Towards Pervasive Appliance.- Overview of Japanese Activities in Software-defined Radio.- SDR Applications for the Next Generation Wireless Access: Prototype Implementation.- Mobile Multi-mode Terminal: Making Trade-offs Between Software and Fixed Digital Radio.- SDRApplication for Mobile Appliance.- SDR Application for Intelligent Transport Systems.- Software Radio for ATC Application.- 5 Network Architecture: Protocols and Services.- Software Defined Radio: What Do We Do with It?.- OPtIMA: An Open Protocol Programming Interface Model and Architecture for Reconfiguration in Soft-radios.- 6 Enabling Technologies.- Front End Architecture for a Software Defined Radio Base Station.- DSP-based CDMA Satellite Modem: CNIT/ASI Project.- A Round Robin Protocol for the Integration of Video and Data Bursty Traffics in Wireless ATM Networks.- An Efficient Frequency Sampling Design of FIR Raised-Cosine Filters for Software Radio Applications.- High Computational Capacity Flexible Architecture for the Realization of Wide Band Digital Communication Systems for Radio Relays.- The Software Radio Technique Applied to the RF Front-end for Cellular Mobile Systems.