Signal Processing A new programming environment for software defined radio applications

The mobile communication market is confronted with an increasing number of communication standards and a corresponding complexity of the mobile terminal applications. To cope with this complexity, the Software Defined Radio (SDR) approach gains more and more attractiveness. Hardware platforms for SDR must meet the conflicting goals of flexibility, that is support for different protocols, and low power consumption. Therefore, upcoming platforms deploy parallelism, which complicates software development and requires specific knowledge about the hardware architecture. To simplify the development process, we suggest to separate the application development process into two steps, such that developers only need experience in either the software or the hardware area. In the first step, the application is specified in a hardware-independent way, and in the second step, the hardware-specific implementation is done by application-independent tools. We developed a new programming environment called Virtual Radio Engine (VRE) that supports this approach. This paper describes the VRE tool chain. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.