#Radio Software Software Boundary In

Radio Software Software Boundary In

2010)Today, software radioВ developers are facing a platform dilemma. Indeed, researchers and engineers have been making progress in this direction and has been constantly pushing the hardware-software boundary in wireless communications. It is an engineering dream that one day, all wireless functions will be implemented completely inВ software. The lack of flexibility and programmability makes experimental research in wireless communication become very difficult, especially for research groups in academics.Software Radio (or Software Defined Radio, SDR) holds the promise of fully programmable wireless communication systems, effectively supplanting current technologies that have the lowest communication layers implemented primarily in fixed, custom hardware circuits. It is also fixed, and therefore, once it is delivered, it cannot be changed or upgraded. Designing ASIC is costly, both economically and time-wise.

However, since PC hardware and software have not been designed for wireless signal processing, existing GPP-based SDR platforms can achieve only limited performance. Developers program to a familiar architecture and environment using sophisticated tools, and radio front-end boards for interfacing with a PC are relatively inexpensive. Hardware platforms can also be expensive.In contrast, SDR platforms based on general-purpose processor (GPP) architectures, such as commodity PCs, have the opposite set of tradeoffs. Developers have to learn how to program to each particular embedded architecture, often without the support of a rich development environment of programming and debugging tools. Such hardware platforms can meet the processing and timing requirements of modern high-speed wireless protocols, but programming FPGAs and specialized DSPs are difficult tasks.

It is based on software running on a low-cost, commodity PCВ with a general purpose OS (like Windows).We take a multi-core PC, plug in a PCIe radio control board we developed,В and hook upВ a third-party radio front-end with antennaВ вЂ”В that becomes a powerful software radio platform. The Sora ApproachMicrosoft Research has provided a solution to thisВ platform dilemma by developing Microsoft Research Software Radio (Sora), a fully programmable software radio platform that provides the benefits of both SDR approaches. These constraints prevent developers from using such platforms to achieve the full fidelity of state-of-the-art wireless protocols while using standard operating systems and applications in a real environment.

Additional software development tools and common signal processing libraries are also included in the Sora software package.This provides a convenient way for experimenting with novel wireless technologies. The Sora software stackВ manages the system resourcesВ and enforces the real-time requirements. The programmers can write any baseband signal processing software freely, usually in C language. All is left to the software running in the PC.The PC runs a normal operating system (Microsoft Windows) with the Sora drivers and SDK installed.В The Sora software stackВ manages all aspects of the radio hardware and provides an environment for the programmers to manipulate the I/Q signals in main memory directly. No baseband signal processing takes place in hardware. It also takes the software-generated waveforms (outgoing I/Q signals) from PC memory and pushes them through the RF front-end at the right timing.

Physical layer (PHY) signal processing has very high computational requirements for generating information bits from waveforms, and vice versa, particularly at high modulation rates indeed, back-of-the-envelope calculations for processing requirements on GPPs have instead motivated specialized hardware approaches in the past. Existing GPP platforms like GNU Radio (USRP) use USB 2.0 or Gigabit Ethernet, which cannot satisfy this requirement for high-speed wireless protocols. Transferring high-fidelity digital waveform samples into PC memory for processing requires very high bus throughput. 2009)To develop such a high-speed wireless platform on general-purpose PC architectures is very challenging: Software radios implemented on Sora appear like any other network device, and users can run unmodified applications on their software radios with the same performance as commodity hardware wireless devices. Developers program in familiar programming environments with powerful tools on standard operating systems.

We have developed a new, inexpensive radio control board (RCB) with a radio frontend for transmission and reception. Existing software architectures in the PC cannot consistently meet this timing requirement.Sora uses both hardware and software techniques to address the challenges of using PC architecture for high-speed SDR: For example, the 802.11 MAC protocol requires precise timing control and ACK response latency on the order of tens of microseconds.

For Wi-Fi, Sora is able to do 802.11 a/b/g/n in full data-rate (up to 40MHz channel, up to 64QAM, up to 4Г—4 MIMO). Sora is the first SDR platform that enables users to develop high-speed wireless implementations, such as the IEEE 802.11a/b/g PHY and MAC, entirely in software on a standard PC architecture.Sora has been used to implement and run the-state-the-art wireless standards including Wi-Fi and LTE. SoftWiFi currently supports the full suite of 802.11a/b/g modulation rates, seamlessly interoperates with commercial 802.11 NICs, and achieves equivalent performance as commercial NICs at each modulation. We demonstrate that it is a simple yet crucial abstraction that guarantees the computational resources and precise timing control necessary for SDR on a GPP.The Microsoft Research Asia team has developed a demonstration radio system, SoftWiFi, based on the Sora platform. To meet the real-time requirements of high-speed wireless protocols, Sora provides a new kernel service, core dedication, which allocates processor cores exclusively for real-time SDR tasks. With these optimizations, Sora can fully support the complete digital processing of 802.11b modulation rates on just one core (2GHz IntelВ x86), and 802.11a/g on two cores.

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