An Environment for (re)configuration and Execution Managenment of Flexible Radio Platforms

This paper presents the Flexible Radio Kernel (FRK), a configuration and execution management environment for hybrid hardware/software flexible radio platform. The aim of FRK is to manage platform reconfiguration for multi-mode, multi-standard operation, with different levels of abstraction. A high level framework is described, to manage multiple MAC layers, and to enable MAC cooperation algorithms for cognitive radio. A low-level environment is also available to manage platform reconfiguration for radio operations. Radio can be implemented using hardware or software elements. Configuration state is hidden to the high-level layers, offering pseudo concurrency (time sharing) properties. This study presents a global view of FRK, with details on some specific parts of the environment. A practical study with algorithmic description is presented.