A gigabit ethternet switch based Software Radio platform for Gbps wireless communications

Software Radio (SR) is an emerging paradigm of the wireless communication system design due to its flexibility and adaptability. However, the implementation of SR platform is always challenging, especially for high date rate transmission such as up to 1Gbps. Although general-purpose processor(GPP) based SR platform can take full advantages of Software Radio, the performance is often limited due to the lack of real-time processing capacity for high-throughput radio systems, especially for high-throughput channel decoding. Therefore, hardware accelerating units(HAU) are usually also involved in the SR platform, such as field programmable gate arrays(FPGAs) and embedded digital signal processors(DSPs). As HAUs and GPPs have their own advantages for different applications in SR, the scalability of interface is a bottleneck in the implementation of SR platform. In this paper, a Gigabit Ethernet(GE) switch based programmable platform for Gbps wireless communications is presented. By means of the good scalability and flexibility of GE interface, the new structure based on GE data-switch combines the real-time computing performance of HAUs with the adaptability and programmability of GPPs, which can provide a radio platform with great scalability for the development of future wireless communication technologies. As a demonstration, a MIMO-OFDM radio system has been designed and implemented on this platform, which can achieve a throughput up to 1Gbps.