A generic framework for evaluating the performance of software defined radio algorithms

Abstract

The usage of Software Defined Radio (SDR) even in Consumer Electronics (CE) devices is becoming more and more important because it provides high flexibility and reconfigurability. Although a real-time SDR implementation even of state of the art systems such as LTE-A+ or DVB-T2 using General Purpose Processors (GPPs) is possible, the performance of SDR applications is still an interesting research topic. Therefore, we developed a generic C++ based framework for evaluating the performance of these applications. The framework supports different metrics for different kinds of analysis, e. g. time, clock cycles per instruction or data throughput. These metrics can be used for the evaluation and comparison of different implementations of typical SDR algorithms such as Turbo Decoding, Fast Fourier Transformation, or Quadrature Amplitude Demodulation. Furthermore, it is shown how an SDR application can use this framework to automatically determine and use the best available implementation of an algorithm on a given platform, e. g. the fastest or the most energy-efficient implementation.