Realizing Software Defined Radio - A Study in Designing Mobile Supercomputers.
Scott A. Mahlke, Trevor Mudge, Yuan Lin · Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2008
The physical layer of most wireless protocols is traditionally implemented in custom hardware to satisfy the heavy computational requirements while keeping power consumption to a minimum. These implementations are time consuming to design and difficult to verify. A programmable hardware platform capable of supporting software implementations of the physical layer, or Software Defined Radio (SDR), has a number of advantages. These include support for multiple protocols, faster time-to-market, higher chip volumes, and support for late implementation changes. The challenge is to achieve this under the power budget of a mobile device. Wireless communications belong to an emerging class of applications with the processing requirements of a supercomputer but the power constraints of a mobile device – mobile supercomputing. This thesis presents a set of design proposals for building a programmable wireless communication solution. In order to design a solution that can meet the lofty requirements of SDR, this thesis takes an application-centric design approach – evaluate andoptimize all aspects of the design based on the characteristics of wireless communication protocols. This includes a DSP processor architecture optimized for wireless baseband processing,