A scalable Software Defined Radio receiver for video and audio broadcasting on personal computers

Software defined radios (SDR) can be found in every area of wireless signal processing. SDRs realized so far are mostly part of communication technology, including audio broadcast receivers. Image- and video processing in SDRs is not common due to the fact that this type of real-time application requires a huge amount of processing resources. It can be foreseen that SDRs for video processing will be the next attractive approach for flexible and cost-effective media systems. We started with functional diagrams of the required modules for TV receivers, selected suitable algorithms to estimate their computational complexity and investigated their resource-quality scaling properties. Thereafter benchmark tests were done for a variety of common general purpose processors (GPPs), showing that real-time performance will be possible in the near future.