Performance analysis and comparison of GPP-based SDR systems

Abstract

With the development of wireless communications, varies of wireless protocols have come into being. For quickly verifying the new communication technology, the most effective method is through software. Simple software simulation has been unable to meet the needs of people for technical verification, thus Software Defined Radio (SDR) emerges at the right moment. In this paper, we first make a brief overview of general purpose processor based SDR (GPP SDR), then review the current state of development and future trends in this area. Moreover, we introduce two famous GPP SDR platforms, i.e. OpenAirInterface (OAI) and srsLTE. OAI has been well known by many researchers and widely used in scientific research. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no detailed introduction to srsLTE. We set up OAI and srsLTE in laboratory and give a specific analysis to the key source codes of physical layer (PHY) downlink (DL) on the platforms. Furthermore, the PHY DL performance is evaluated and compared. Our result demonstrates that OAI and srsLTE are both feasible and stable SDR platforms, which proves that GPP is powerful enough to process wideband signal like LTE. GPP SDR has become the mainstream in the design of SDR. We wish to introduce these two platforms to open source community and our results could provide a reference for further research or deployment of GPP SDR.