Computing Resource Management for SDR Platforms

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an emerging technology that is based on the software implementation of the signal processing blocks found in a radio transceiver. The switch between radio access technologies may then be as easy as changing the software running on a future SDR terminal. SDR terminals refer to mobile equipment and base stations. These terminals will comprise general purpose processors, digital signal processors and/or reconfigurable logic devices. As a result, typical heterogeneous computing problems may appear in the SDR context. This article focuses on the mapping issue, discusses its relevance in software defined radio, and introduces an adequate mapping algorithm. The algorithm efficiently tackles the problem of mapping SDR function chains, i.e. signal processing blocks of a SDR transceiver, to heterogeneous processing platforms. We expose our approach, discuss its performance, present extensive simulation results and derive conclusions.