Efficient And Portable SDR Waveform Development: The Nucleus Concept

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Nucleus concept, a novel approach for developing efficient, portable, and flexible wireless signal processing waveforms in SDRs by exploiting common structures to optimize implementation across hardware platforms.

Contribution

The Nucleus concept leverages shared structures in wireless algorithms to enable efficient, portable waveform development with high-level programmability and optimized hardware performance.

Findings

Enables efficient waveform mapping and exploration

Reduces porting effort across hardware platforms

Balances software flexibility with hardware efficiency

Abstract

Future wireless communication systems should be flexible to support different waveforms (WFs) and be cognitive to sense the environment and tune themselves. This has lead to tremendous interest in software defined radios (SDRs). Constraints like throughput, latency and low energy demand high implementation efficiency. The tradeoff of going for a highly efficient implementation is the increase of porting effort to a new hardware (HW) platform. In this paper, we propose a novel concept for WF development, the Nucleus concept, that exploits the common structure in various wireless signal processing algorithms and provides a way for efficient and portable implementation. Tool assisted WF mapping and exploration is done efficiently by propagating the implementation and interface properties of Nuclei. The Nucleus concept aims at providing software flexibility with high level programmability, but at the same time limiting HW flexibility to maximize area and energy efficiency.