HyRA: A Software-defined Radio Architecture for Wireless Embedded Systems

Traditional Software-defined Radio (SDR) architectures cannot go with the requirements of embedded systems, specially in terms of performance and power consumption. Lowpower FPGAs now reaching the market might soon become a viable alternative to overcome such limitations. The Hybrid Radio Architecture (HYRA) introduced in this paper contributes to this scenario as it explores the Hybrid HW/SW Component concept to enable the implementation of SDRs as direct mappings of highlevel synchronous data flow models. Although addressing SDR from a higher level of abstraction, HYRA mechanisms proved far more efficient than those behind GNU Radio when the target is an embedded reconfigurable hardware platform. Keywordssoftware-defined radio; embedded systems; FPGA.