Enhancing GNU Radio with Heterogeneous Computing

Abstract

Software radio system performance can be significantly enhanced with appropriate architectural choices, such as the GNU Radio USRP's division of roles between an FPGA and a general purpose CPU. Heterogeneous architectures provide the most flexibility for achieving high computational performance; yet have not been fully exploited by today's software radio architectures. This paper reports on a GNU Radio implementation for the Texas Instruments TCI663X SOC DSP/ARM that was publically released in 2014 and has seen widespread use in the telecommunications industry.