Over the next five to ten years, the deployment of untethered/pervasive computers will increase rapidly. The prime example is the cell phone, but the emergence of many new classes of such devices is expected. These devices will improve on the cell phone by moving advanced functionality, such as always-on Internet access, high-definition streaming video, and human-centric interfaces with voice recognition. One of the key ingredients to pervasive computing is wireless communication. Mobile devices must be able to seamlessly interface to whatever communication services are available as they are moved from location to location, such as different cellular networks and wireless local area networks. Software defined radio (SDR) promises to deliver flexible solutions by implementing wireless protocols wholly in software. SDR executing on programmable hardware substrates facilitates the inter-operability, flexibility, and support for new features that pervasive computing requires. Further, SDR prevents getting locked into fixed and outdated standards that traditional hardware-centric solutions are often faced with. This project focuses on hardware and software innovations to create platforms for SDR that are both programmable and scalable to the projected bandwidth requirements for the next ten years. Innovation in a single direction is not sufficient to accomplish these goals. Rather, a multi-layered approach, consisting of innovation hardware, compiler, and algorithms, is used. Across these three dimensions, this project will develop general techniques for decomposing signal processing algorithms to exploit coarse-grained parallelism, compiler technologies orchestrating the execution of communicating sequential tasks on multicore computing systems, and platform-wide power-aware architectural techniques for supporting SDR on mobile computing devices.
