Efficient and portable SDR waveform development: The Nucleus concept

Future wireless communication systems should be flexible to support different waveforms (WFs) and be cognitive to sense the environment and tune themselves. This has lead to tremendous interest in software defined radios (SDRs). Constraints like throughput, latency and low energy demand high implementation efficiency. The tradeoff of going for a highly efficient WF implementation is the increase of porting effort to a new HW platform. In this paper, we propose a novel concept for WF development, the nucleus concept, that exploits the common structure in various wireless signal processing algorithms and provides a way for efficient and portable implementation. Tool assisted WF mapping and exploration is done efficiently by propagating the implementation and interface properties of nuclei. The nucleus concept aims at providing software flexibility with high level programmability, but at the same time limiting HW flexibility to maximize area and energy efficiency.