Integration of GPU Computing in a Software Radio Environment

International audienceThis article studies the integration of Graphics Processing Units in a Software Defined Radio environment. Two main solutions are considered, based on two levels of granularity for the parallelization. First, a fine grain parallelism solution, which is an extension of the existing solutions but adapted to operations of large computational complexity, is proposed. Second, an original solution based on coarse grain approach allowing better usage of the computing resources and easier parallelism extraction is described. For both solutions, scheduling and communication design as well as implementation are given, along with integration in the environment. Both solutions have been implemented and compared on different operations types and on multi-operations sequences. It is clearly shown that using the second solution can provide performance improvement, while the first one is not adapted to SDR applications

An environment for (re)configuration and execution management of heterogeneous flexible radio platforms

International audienceThis paper presents the Flexible Radio Kernel (FRK), a configuration and execution management environment for hybrid hardware/software flexible radio platforms. The aim of FRK is to manage platform reconfiguration for multi-mode, multi-standard operation, with different levels of abstraction.A high level framework is defined and described. Its goal is to manage multiple Medium Access Control layers and to enable cooperation algorithms for cognitive radio. A low-level environment is also available to manage platform reconfiguration for radio operations. Radios can make use of hardware or software elements, and configuration state is hidden to the high-level layers, offering pseudo concurrency (time sharing) properties independently of the nature of the elements implementation. This study presents a global view of FRK, with a specific focus on its software architecture and its support of configurable hardware. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through a practical example