Instruction Set Extensions for AES Processing on a Multithreaded Software Defined Radio Platform

Software-defined radio (SDR) is an emerging technology that facilitates having multiple wireless communication protocols on one device. Previous work has shown that current W-CDMA, GPS, GSM, and WiMAX applications can run on this class of device while consuming significant processing power. Next generation wireless networks require speeds in excess of 50Mbps. Some of the fastest AES software implementations only achieve 20Mbps single-threaded performance on our reference platform. In order to have secure software-defined radio, the security processing gap must be addressed. This paper presents instruction set architecture (ISA) extensions for the Sandblaster DSP for AES processing.