A Wideband Front-End Receiver Implementation on GPUs

Abstract

Modern communication systems have frequency bands that are shared with multiple channels. A typical front-end transceiver is responsible for processing multiple channels simultaneously within the band. Although it is simpler to design a dedicated sub-transceiver for each channel, the overall cost of implementation is prohibitive. It is more desirable to design a single system that can process many channels at the same time. However, it is difficult to realize such a transceiver in wireless communication systems, since it needs to accommodate different standards, data rates, sampling rates, etc. In this paper, we address the challenges of flexible, cost-effective, multi-channel implementation of wideband receiver systems. In particular, we develop a novel implementation by applying graphics processing unit (GPU) technology to a wideband receiver that processes multiple channels at the same time, including channelization and arbitrary resampling. Our proposed new receiver architecture is flexible and reconfigurable via software, while providing high throughput and low latency.