A novel GPP-based Software-Defined Radio architecture

This paper presents a new architecture for software-defined radio (SDR) platform on commodity PCs with multi-core CPUs, which uses both hardware and software techniques to address the challenges of using PC architectures for high-throughput SDR. The new architecture introduces PCI Express (PCIe) bus for high-throughput, low-latency data transfer interface between hardware platform and PC memories. It also adopts the Xenomai operating system (OS) to meet the real-time requirements of modern wireless protocols. Further, we propose an interrupt-driven model to guarantee the synchronization between hardware and software. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture can well meet the requirement of modern wireless communication systems.