Analyzing models of computation for software defined radio applications

Applying design principles and methodologies constituted in the software domain and being adapted to the complete execution environment provides new perspectives for future multi-radio computers. In order to share the underlying hardware resources efficiently, the overall system architecture and related programming model has to support dynamic behavior and extensive changes in the configuration during run-time. The requirements for such a multi-radio computer are demanding, as there will be various radio access stacks with inhomogeneous characteristics executing in parallel. This implies a configuration and control framework, besides the different protocol stacks, that is aware of the managed system in every state and is capable of dynamically scheduling different dataflow graphs corresponding to the applications running on the underlying system. This paper presents the main concepts behind such a reactive system, focusing in particular on the proposed model of computation, giving an overview on the software architecture and related problems to be solved.