Using OpenCL to Increase SCA Application Portability

Abstract

The Software Communications Architecture has become the de facto standard to build Software Defined Radio radios. Over one hundred thousand SCA military radios have been deployed worldwide by several nations. The SCA offers a component-based operating environment for the creation of portable applications. SCA applications are portable across different heterogeneous embedded distributed system. For performance reasons, application software gets optimized using specialized instructions sets supported by General Purpose Processors, Digital Signal Processors Graphical Processing Units. As a result, the level of portability of the source code can decrease significantly. Moreover, portability is considered to be a major challenge when Field Programmable Gate Arrays are used. Specialized instruction sets are widely used for high performance military radio platforms. Consequently, finding a solution to increase portability of SCA applications across different operating environments could provide significant cost reductions. This paper describes how the Open Computing Language (OpenCL™) can be used in conjunction with the SCA to increase the portability of applications that need to perform intensive signal processing.