Sora: high performance software radio using general purpose multi-core processors

TLDR

Sora combines the performance and fidelity of hardware SDR platforms with the programmability and flexibility of general‑purpose processor SDR platforms. This paper presents Sora, a fully programmable software radio platform on commodity PC architectures. Sora employs a hybrid hardware‑software design, featuring a radio front‑end and control board for low‑latency data transfer, and leverages modern CPU features—dedicated cores, large caches, and SIMD extensions—to accelerate wireless protocol processing and meet timing constraints on commodity PCs. Using Sora, the authors built SoftWiFi, a demonstration radio that interoperates with commercial 802.11a/b/g NICs and matches their performance across all modulations.

Abstract

This paper presents Sora, a fully programmable software radio platform on commodity PC architectures. Sora combines the performance and fidelity of hardware SDR platforms with the programmability and flexibility of general-purpose processor (GPP) SDR platforms. Sora uses both hardware and software techniques to address the challenges of using PC architectures for high-speed SDR. The Sora hardware components consist of a radio front-end for reception and transmission, and a radio control board for high-throughput, low-latency data transfer between radio and host memories. Sora makes extensive use of features of contemporary processor architectures to accelerate wireless protocol processing and satisfy protocol timing requirements, including using dedicated CPU cores, large low-latency caches to store lookup tables, and SIMD processor extensions for highly efficient physical layer processing on GPPs. Using the Sora platform, we have developed a demonstration radio system called SoftWiFi. SoftWiFi seamlessly interoperates with commercial 802.11a/b/g NICs, and achieves equivalent performance as commercial NICs at each modulation.