Book excerpt: Based on the popular Artech House classic, Digital Communication Systems Engineering with Software-Defined Radio, this book provides a practical approach to quickly learning the software-defined radio (SDR) concepts needed for work in the field. This up-to-date volume guides readers on how to quickly prototype wireless designs using SDR for real-world testing and experimentation. This book explores advanced wireless communication techniques such as OFDM, LTE, WLA, and hardware targeting. Readers will gain an understanding of the core concepts behind wireless hardware, such as the radio frequency front-end, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, as well as various processing technologies. Moreover, this volume includes chapters on timing estimation, matched filtering, frame synchronization message decoding, and source coding. The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing is explained and details about HDL code generation and deployment are provided. The book concludes with coverage of the WLAN toolbox with OFDM beacon reception and the LTE toolbox with downlink reception. Multiple case studies are provided throughout the book. Both MATLAB and Simulink source code are included to assist readers with their projects in the field.