Seamless sequence of software defined radio designs through hardware reconfigurability of FPGAs

Abstract

Software Defined Radio (SDR) base stations can compensate for failures in disaster scenarios by assimilating different communication technologies. FPGAs play an important role in the platform of an SDR base station because of flexibility and DSP processing power that they deliver. The flexibility of FPGAs comes at the high cost of reconfiguration time overhead which can be a serious deterrence because of QoS requirements of real time traffic. In this paper we propose a solution to reduce reconfiguration time overhead at system-level where we are provided the configuration of each wireless system. Following that we step further and integrate our solution in to a floorplanner to generate placements for wireless systems which can systematically hide or reduce reconfiguration time overhead. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.