Instruction set extensions for software defined radio on a multithreaded processor

Software dened radios, which provide a programmable solu-tion for implementing the physical layer processing of multi-ple communication standards, are widely recognized as one of the most important new technologies for wireless com-munication systems. Emerging communication standards, however, require tremendous processing capabilities to per-form high-bandwidth physical-layer processing in real time. In this paper, we present instruction set extensions for sev-eral important communication algorithms including convo-lutional encoding, Viterbi decoding, turbo decoding, and Reed-Solomon encoding and decoding. The performance bene ts of these extensions are evaluated using a supercom-puter class vectorizing compiler and the Sandblaster low-power multithreaded processor for software dened radio. The proposed instruction set extensions provide signicant performance improvements, while maintaining a high degree of programmability. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.3 [Computer Systems Organization]: Special-purpose and Application-based Systems|Real-time and embedded sys