Software-defined Radio based On Cortex-A9

Abstract

This paper presents an implementation of Software-defined Radio (SDR) system over ARM Cortex-A9 processor. Compared with conventionally used general purpose CPU, e.g. X86 CPU, ARM processors have advantages in both price and power consumption under the same computing capability. Two basic issues of SDR over ARM are investigated: the real-time operation and signal processing efficiency. For the former issue, we select the Linux-based real-time operating system Xenomai, which is built on Cortex-A9 platform. Testing results show that the performance of Xenomai on Cortex-A9 meets the real-time requirement of SDR. Furthermore, the NEON technology of Cortex-A9 is used to optimize the complex signal processing algorithms in communication systems. Soft Demodulation is taken as an example for the optimization, and the experimental results are provided to show the improvement of signal processing efficiency.