A Cycle Accurate NoC Simulation Framework for Early Phase Exploration of SDR Platforms

Software-defined radio (SDR) terminals are critical to enable concrete and consecutive inter-working between fourth generation wireless access systems or communication modes. The next generation of SDR terminals is intended to have heavy hardware resource requirements and switching between them will introduce dynamism in respect with timing and size of resource requests. On the longer term, SDR terminals will be extended to become cognitive radios enabling efficient spectrum usage. This paper presents a system-level framework combined with a cycle-accurate NoC simulation environment that enables the simulation of such complex, dynamic hardware/software SDR designs. The platform specifications are represented as a virtual architecture by a coarse-grain simulator described in SystemC that includes a set of configuration parameters. The key of our approach is that our simulator environment provides automatic wrapper tools able to explore the SDR platform parameters and simultaneously transmit the interconnection traffic in a cycle-accurate NoC simulator giving the opportunity to examine the impact of different topologies at the system bandwidth at execution time. Thus, we can do an exploration, which can pinpoint at a very early design phase the platform component requirements for future SDR applications. This approach shows a drastic design-time reduction with the maximum possible simulation accuracy.