The Radio Virtual Machine: A solution for SDR portability and platform reconfigurability

Instead of a single circuit dedicated to a particular physical (PHY) layer standard, a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform embeds several hardware accelerators which enable it to support different modulation schemes. In this study we propose an architecture for a SDR PHY layer based on the Virtual Machine (VM) concept. Once a program is compiled in a portable byte-code, the VM can then execute it to manage the desired PHY layer. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture through a case study and a proof-of-concept implementation.