KOR

e-Article

On the Computation/Memory Trade-Off in Software Defined Radios
Document Type
Conference
Source
2010 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference GLOBECOM 2010 Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM 2010), 2010 IEEE. :1-5 Dec, 2010
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal processing algorithms
Acceleration
Computational efficiency
Memory management
Digital video broadcasting
Signal processing
Telecommunication standards
Language
ISSN
1930-529X
Abstract
Since J. Mitola's seminal work in the 90's, Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have been a hot topic in wireless communication research. Though many notable achievements were reported in the field, the scarcity of computational power on general purpose CPUs has always been a limiting factor. If conveniently applied within an SDR context, classical concepts known in computer science as space/time trade-offs can prove helpful when trying to mitigate this problem. This paper presents a novel criterion to design signal- processing software in an SDR terminal that we call Memory Acceleration (MA). The key feature of MA is making extensive use of memory resources of the SDR platform in order to accelerate the most critical signal processing functions. MA provides substantial acceleration factors when applied to conventional SDRs without reducing their peculiar flexibility and appears particularly suited to the implementation of a fully-SW SDR on a general- purpose processor (GPP). As a case study for the application of MA, results about the implementation of the ETSI DVB-T Viterbi decoder are presented. In such a case, MA provides an acceleration factor of 10.4x with respect to a standard, purely-computational implementation while having no impact on error correction performance of the decoder and by making no use of any other typical performance enhancement technique (e.g. low level programming or parallel computation).