Software-defined radio in the context of RF front end

Demodulation is the process of extracting the original information-bearing signal from a carrier wave. A demodulator is an electronic circuit (or computer program in a software-defined radio) that is used to recover the information content from the modulated carrier wave. There are many types of signal modulation, and there are many types of demodulators. The signal output from a demodulator may represent sound (an analog audio signal), images (an analog video signal) or binary data (a digital signal).

These terms are traditionally used in connection with radio receivers, but many other systems use many kinds of demodulators. For example, in a modem, which is a contraction of the terms modulator/demodulator, a demodulator is used to extract a serial digital data stream from a carrier signal which is used to carry it through a telephone line, coaxial cable, or optical fiber.

Dynamic spectrum management (DSM), also referred to as dynamic spectrum access (DSA), is a set of techniques based on theoretical concepts in network information theory and game theory that is being researched and developed to improve the performance of a communication network as a whole. The concept of DSM also draws principles from the fields of cross-layer optimization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. It has been recently made possible by the availability of software-defined radio due to development of fast enough processors both at servers and at terminals. These are techniques for cooperative optimization. This can also be compared or related to optimization of one link in the network on the account of losing performance on many links negatively affected by this single optimization.

It is most commonly applied to optimize digital subscriber line (DSL) performance of a network. Another potential application of DSM is for cognitive radio.