Efficient Open Source Software Radio on Heterogeneous Multicore Embedded Platforms

Software radio is a common technique in modern communications equipment, and it is frequently implemented using heterogeneous multicore processors because of its high computational requirements. Programming such systems is still a challenging task and developers rely often on standard parallel APIs and frameworks such as OpenMP and OpenCL. These tools, however, present some limitations when more than one algorithm has to be accelerated. The typical workload of a software radio usually includes several compute-intensive algorithms so it might be still better served by more specific tools, especially on embedded platforms. In this article, a development methodology for implementing software radio applications in heterogeneous multicore embedded platforms is proposed. The methodology is based on GNU radio, a free and open source software toolkit. To validate the methodology, a DVB-T receiver has been ported to an embedded heterogeneous multicore platform as a proof-of-concept. The results show that two different compute-intensive algorithms, Viterbi decoder, and FFT, can be simultaneously accelerated, improving the DVB-T receiver performance by 63%.