CCSDS 131.2-B-1 Software Defined Radio receiver featuring GPU accelerators: up to 1000x with respect to CPU implementation.

Abstract

Nowadays the number of Earth Observation missions are exponentially increasing. Each satellite may embark payloads which produce a big amount of data, that need to be transmitted on-ground. To address large data transmissions, proper of this kind of missions, CCSDS 131.2-B standard has been developed. A limiting factor in the adoption of this communication system is represented by the complexity of the hardware required for running a receiver in real time. Software Defined Radio (SDR) receivers represent a potential low-cost solution when dealing with scientific data or low-medium-data rate. In this perspective, we present in this paper the implementation of an SDR dedicated to CCSDS 131.2-B. In particular, this software was designed following the Single Instruction Multiple Data paradigm to speed up the reception and data processing, exploiting the so called General Purpose-Graphic Processing Unit (GP-GPU). The entire software has been designed to be completely modular, i.e., allowing to easily add/modify each block in the reception chain. The preliminary results of the adoption of this SDR as a CCSDS 131.2-B receiver, has shown excellent performance, maintaining a throughput up to 10 MBaud for ACM 1-7. This throughput can be easily increased exploiting parallelism at decoder level, hence linearly increasing the SDR performance, up to the GP-GPU memory filling. The proposed solution is designed to be a game changer and a potential flagship killer for such missions wich requirements are relaxed in term of throughput.