Accelerating an IEEE 802.11 a/g/p Transceiver in GNU Radio

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an approach where signal processing components of a radio transceiver are moved from the dedicated hardware to a combination of software and general purpose processors. This change offers many advantages, mainly for experimentation and prototyping as it allows to modify low-level functions without any change in hardware, but may also permit to contribute to solve future Internet challenges such as the ever necessary equipment upgrades caused by the rapidly growing demands of users. Recently, an implementation of a SDR IEEE 802.11 transceiver has been presented. Although this tool shows a clever realization, it presents some performance issues, bounding the obtained data rates. In this work we propose a set of software improvements to accelerate the implementation with the aim of improving achieved the data transfer rates. The experimental evaluation conducted reveals, depending on the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) used, that our proposal obtains improvement factors between 2× and 10×.