Software Radios: Unifying the Reconfiguration Process over Heterogeneous Platforms
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Software Radios: Unifying the Reconfiguration Process over Heterogeneous Platforms ´ Xavier Reves Departament de Teoria del Senyal i Communicacions, Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain Email: [email protected]
Antoni Gelonch Departament de Teoria del Senyal i Communicacions, Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain Email: [email protected]
Vuk Marojevic Departament de Teoria del Senyal i Communicacions, Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain Email: [email protected]
´ Ramon Ferrus Departament de Teoria del Senyal i Communicacions, Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain Email: [email protected] Received 31 January 2004; Revised 21 February 2005 Future radio transceivers supporting the software radio concept will provide increased features for radio access networks. However, the reconfiguration of radio equipment requires the existence of an architecture, a common framework, which allows the flexible management of software running on radio processors. Such a framework must take into account the heterogeneity of hardware devices and platforms for radio applications. Since the flexibility has a cost in terms of added overhead, a conceptually simple but efficient structure that allows powerful mechanisms to develop and deploy software radio applications is required. This paper describes our approach, the reasons that motivated it, and some implementation issues. The proposed framework is essentially based on four items: an abstraction layer which hides any platform-dependent issue, a simple time-driven software structure, a delimited interface format for software blocks which does not actually constrain communication, and a global time-reference mechanism to guarantee real-time behaviour. Keywords and phrases: software (-defined) radio, reconfiguration, flexible radio, software abstraction layer (middleware), hardware abstraction layer, radio execution environment.
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INTRODUCTION
Software radio [1, 2] is an emerging technology that promises great advantages to radio system engineers and to the wide segment of potential or actual users of these systems. The concept spans from the radio terminals (base stations or mobile equipment) to network management, including resource management for optimum service provision. The key aspect that unleashes the potential behind software radio is the unbinding of radio capabilities from hardware. Software running on digital hardware processors, including generalpurpose processors (GPP), digital signal processors (DSP), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and so forth, may accomplish the hard processing tasks from intermediate frequency (IF) to bit stream at the physical layer and, of course,
the tasks at higher layers. The increase in flexibility allows considering the radio interface as a dynamic and adjustable part of the system rather than a fixed one. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art has not yet reached the technological point to construct an end-to-end completely flexible
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