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Designing a software defined radio to run on a heterogeneous processor

NCJ Number
305971
Author(s)
Almohanad Samir Fayez
Date Published
April 2014
Length
80 pages
Annotation

This thesis explores the use of integrated General Purpose Processors (GPPs) and Digital Signal based Processors (DSPs) for realizing SDR and CR applications.

Abstract

With such processors a GPP realizes the mechanism driving radio reconfiguration, and a DSP is used to implement the SDR by performing the signal processing necessary. This thesis discusses issues related to implementing radios in this computing environment and presents a sample solution for integrating both processors to create SDR-based applications. The thesis presents a sample application running on a Texas Instrument (TI) OMAP3530 processor, utilizing its GPP and DSP cores, on a platform called the Beagleboard. For the application, the Center for Wireless Telecommunications' (CWT) Public Safety Cognitive Radio (PSCR) is ported, and an Android- based touch screen interface is used for user interaction. In porting the PSCR to the Beagleboard USB bandwidth and memory access latency issues were the main system bottlenecks. Latency measurements of these interfaces are presented in the thesis to highlight those bottlenecks and can be used to drive GPP/DSP based system design using the Beagleboard. (Published abstract provided)