Abstract
In the future, software-defined radio may enable a mobile device to support multiple wireless protocols implemented as software applications. These applications, often referred to as waveform applications, could be added, updated, or removed from a software-radio device to meet changing demands. Current software-defined radio solutions grant an active waveform exclusive ownership of a specific transceiver or analog front-end. Since a wireless device has a limited number of front-ends, this approach puts a hard constraint on the number of concurrent waveform applications a device can support. A growing trend in software-defined radio research is to virtualize front-ends to allow sharing and reuse among active waveform applications. This poses a difficult scheduling challenge. This article proposes a new approach in which shared access to front-ends is managed by a mixed-integer linear programming model. This model ties together the technique of time-division sharing and front-end bandwidth channelization. This scheduling model is evaluated in simulation under several different scenarios and workloads. Simulation results show that the proposed approach reduces hardware contention and missed radio accesses compared to existing techniques.
Highlights
The growing number of wireless standards and protocols operated concurrently on today’s devices is unsustainable. Wireless applications such as aircraft avionic systems [1], [2], conventional cellular base stations [3], multiple radio access technology cellular base stations [4], Internet of things (IoT) hubs, and mobile devices support the concurrent operation of multiple wireless standards and protocols and could benefit from software-defined radio (SDR)
Wireless protocols are supported by discrete transmitter/receiver chains encapsulated in discrete application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC)
We propose virtualization be achieved with the combination of dynamically time-division multiplexing (TDM) [10] and dynamic front-end bandwidth channelization [3], a form of frequency-division multiplexing (FDM)
Summary
The growing number of wireless standards and protocols operated concurrently on today’s devices is unsustainable. In [8], researchers identify software and driver limitations as one of the key barriers to general accessibility of SDR by the wireless community Their reasons include the lack of standardization between different front-ends from different manufacturers. These idle periods may be the result of a medium access technology such as time division duplexing (TDD), the result of energy saving techniques such as burst transmissions in IoT, or other technologies This would require only two front-ends and can service four waveform applications The combination of these multiplexing techniques provides a difficult scheduling challenge for SDR platforms. We propose the use of a constraint-based scheduling model based in mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) This approach allows us to accurately model the complicated conditional nature of dynamic channelization. Simulation parameters include the number of request-generating applications, the number of available RF front-ends, and front-end bandwidth
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