A generic C++ toolkit for the development of real-time-capable software defined radio applications

Abstract

Software-Defined-Radio (SDR) describes the approach of realizing communication systems as far as possible in software. Ideally, the antenna and the TX/RX frontend, converting the baseband signal to HF or vice versa, are the only remaining hardware components. The algorithms for the (de-)modulation and (de-)coding of the baseband signal are implemented in software. In conjunction with a powerful processor, this is a flexible and cheap possibility to develop communication systems. Due to the low development costs compared to the development in hardware and the high flexibility, SDRs have become popular in research and development. In order to ease the development of SDR applications, a generic platform-independent C++ toolkit has been developed. It supports data-dominated systems using multi-core architectures. The toolkit represents the system under development as a model consisting of multiple processing blocks with packet-based input and output data streams. A graphical user interface providing automatic code generation eases the use of the toolkit.