Profiling of GNU Radio DVB-S2X transmitter using multi-core CPU and hardware accelerators

Abstract

Software defined radio (SDR) brought flexibility and easier development to the design of telecommunication systems. However, achieving real-time performance with SDR using general purpose processors (GPP) is still a challenging topic. We have examined performance of SDR DVB-S2X transmitter implemented in GNU Radio framework using a multi-core processor with 32 cores. We have found that GNU Radio framework cannot fully utilize this processor since overheads of parallelization become bottleneck. When FEC blocks are offloaded to hardware accelerator, transmitter achieved the largest throughput for just 8 CPU cores. This means that there exists optimal number of processing cores for specific SDR architecture. Maximal achieved throughput for accelerated DVB-S2X transmitter was 3.4 Gbps. Also, accelerated architecture provides throughput of 1.8 Gbps for 4 CPU cores which is higher than 1.3 Gbps achieved for 32 CPU cores and full software implementation.