SPU Based Network Module for Software Radio System on Cell Multicore Platform

Wireless baseband processing is characterized by high computation complexity and high data throughput, which is regarded as the most challenging issue for software radio (SR) systems. Recently, with the rapid development of multicore technology, the multicore platforms can provide high computation capacity and high data throughput, which suit the SR systems well. We have presented a SR system on the Cell multicore platform. However, it is observed that the data communication between the baseband processing module and the RF module consumes a mass of system resources. The data I/O communication becomes the bottleneck for the SR system on multicore platform. To resolve this problem, in this paper, an efficient SPU based network module is presented. With the proposed module, all the network packets parsing and packaging is handled by the SPU, the PPU resources are released and the system performance will be improved greatly. Index Terms — Multicore Architecture, Software Radio, Cell, I/O communication