Complexity of a software GSM base station

There is increasing interest in developing radio-based applications in software. The new architecture for implementing mobile telephony base stations has the potential of offering many benefits: great cost savings by using one transceiver per base transceiver station (BTS) instead of one per channel, tremendous flexibility by moving system-specific parameters to the digital part, and allowing the support of a wide range of modulation and coding schemes. A very important problem in designing software radio applications is the need to estimate the required complexity of processing to dimension systems. For example, with a software GSM BTS it is critical to estimate the number of channels that can be supported by a given processor configuration, and to predict the impact of future processor enhancements on its capacity. This article focuses on the design of a software implementation of a GSM BTS and proposes a platform-independent evaluation of its computational requirements based on SPEC benchmarks. It focuses on the design and performance of a library of software modules. Portability and computational requirements are discussed.