A New Compilation Flow for Software-Defined Radio Applications on Heterogeneous MPSoCs

The advent of portable software-defined radio (sdr) technology is tightly linked to the resolution of a difficult problem: efficient compilation of signal processing applications on embedded computing devices. Modern wireless communication protocols use packet processing rather than infinite stream processing and also introduce dependencies between data value and computation behavior leading to dynamic dataflow behavior. Recently, parametric dataflow has been proposed to support dynamicity while maintaining the high level of analyzability needed for efficient real-life implementations of signal processing computations. This article presents a new compilation flow that is able to compile parametric dataflow graphs. Built on the llvm compiler infrastructure, the compiler offers an actor-based C++ programming model to describe parametric graphs, a compilation front end for graph analysis, and a back end that currently matches the Magali platform: a prototype heterogeneous MPSoC dedicated to LTE-Advanced. We also introduce an innovative scheduling technique, called microscheduling, allowing one to adapt the mapping of parametric dataflow programs to the specificities of the different possible MPSoCs targeted. A specific focus on fifo sizing on the target architecture is presented. The experimental results show compilation of 3gpp lte-advanced demodulation on Magali with tight memory size constraints. The compiled programs achieve performance similar to handwritten code.

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