Scalable Software Defined FM-radio receiver running on desktop computers

Software Defined Radios (SDRs) are increasingly attractive to replace common hardware solutions. Current SDRs are mostly part of communication systems using hardware front ends containing DSPs or FPGAs. Processing on CPUs only is not common due to the huge amount of processing resources required. Most current CPUs are not able to handle this. The goal is to minimize receiver specific hardware components. At the best an antenna and A/D-converter are necessary only for a flexible and cost-effective solution. We present a different approach to realize SDR-receivers on desktop computers optimized for multi-core CPUs and already available General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU). In addition, the processing software is scalable to guarantee real-time performance at varying processing resources. The novel scalable software defined FM-radio receiver is able to control the output quality related to the resource consumption. We focus on a two-folded approach. On the one hand we distribute the processing algorithms over different available processing units, like CPUs or GPGPUs. On the other hand we use Resource-quality scalable algorithms which can be adapted to the available resources.