UHD-DPDK Performance Analysis for Advanced Software Radio Communications

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of UHD with DPDK in SDR systems, demonstrating that kernel bypass frameworks significantly improve data transfer efficiency between SDR applications and radio hardware.

Contribution

It provides an empirical evaluation of UHD with DPDK in SDR environments, highlighting performance gains with kernel bypass techniques.

Findings

Kernel bypass frameworks improve data transfer performance

Measurement results show increased throughput with DPDK

UHD with DPDK enhances SDR system efficiency

Abstract

Research conducted in LTE and 5G wireless communications systems uses common off-the-shelf hardware components and commercial software defined radio (SDR) hardware. One of the more popular SDR platforms is the Ettus USRP product line which uses the UHD driver and transport protocol framework. System performance can be increased using kernel bypass frameworks along with UHD. This paper investigates UHD with DPDK in an SDR environment using srslTE as the SDR application. We present measurement results using the iperf3 network performance application that show performance improvements when employing a kernel bypass framework to facilitate data transfer over the network interface between the SDR application and the radio hardware.