The cost of an abstraction layer on FPGA devices for software radio applications

Software radio applications require a framework to develop and deploy applications, especially those related to radio infrastructure. It is interesting that a given application may be executed on any software radio. But, since hardware platforms used in this context will have multiple architectures and devices, a software layer to make applications independent from hardware is mandatory. Ad-hoc software for a given hardware platform may produce the best software performance. Conversely, when software is not targeted to any concrete platform the lost of performance may be excessive and the overhead introduced by any platform-dependent library could become intolerable. In this paper the resource utilization of a software radio application using a simple hardware abstraction layer is studied and compared to an ad-hoc implementation to make an assessment of the introduced overhead. The particularity of the hardware abstraction layer is that it runs on a platform which only processors are FPGA devices.