Abstract-Software defined radio (SDR) opens a new door to future Internet of Things with higher degree of designing flexibility in context of wireless system development. Prototyping a remote implementation of wireless protocols on a hardware over the web requires a highly versatile software radio platform along with laid-back designing tools. To this aim, an FPGA-based SDR scheme has been proposed combining Virtex-6 Perseus 6010 platform capabilities and a design flow based on High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools. A full IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) physical layer has been implemented on the proposed platform from a C-language dataflow specification. All the results have been analyzed to lead to a fair comparison between different design flows. Although the proposed SDR has some designing issues, it shows a noticeable designing potentiality to flexible prototyping of future wireless systems.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is now becoming a ubiquitous concept to describe and implement Physical Layers (PHYs) of wireless systems. Moreover, even though the FPGA is expected to play a key role in SDR, describing a PHY at the Register-Transfer-Level (RTL) requires tremendous efforts. This paper introduces a novel methodology to rapidly implement PHYs for SDR. The work relies upon High-Level Synthesis tools and dataflow modeling in order to infer an efficient RTL control unit for the application. The proposed software-based over-layer partly handles the complexity of programming an FPGA and integrates reconfigurable features. It consists essentially of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) combined to a DSL-Compiler. An IEEE 802.11a transceiver has been explored via this approach in order to show the flexibility features.

Abstract-The FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology is expected to play a key role in the development of Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms. To this aim, leveraging the nascent High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools, a design flow from high-level specifications to Register-Transfer Level (RTL) description can be thought. Based on such a flow, this paper describes the Design Space Exploration (DSE) that can be achieved using loop optimizations. The mainstream objective is to demonstrate the compile-time flexibility of an architecture when associated with a reconfigurable platform. Throughout both IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11g waveform examples, we show how the FPGA resources can be tuned according to a targeted throughput.

The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology is expected to play a key role in the development of software-defined radio (SDR) platforms. As this technology evolves, low-level designing methods for prototyping FPGA-based applications did not change throughout the decades. In the outstanding context of SDR, it is important to rapidly implement new waveforms to fulfill such a stringent flexibility paradigm. At the current time, different proposals have defined, through software-based approaches, some efficient methods to prototype SDR waveforms in a processor-based running environment. This paper describes a novel design flow for FPGA-based SDR applications. This flow relies upon high-level synthesis (HLS) principles and leverages the nascent HLS tools. Its entry point is a domain-specific language (DSL) which handles the complexity of programming an FPGA and integrates some SDR features so as to enable automatic waveform control generation from a data frame model. Two waveforms (IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11a) have been designed and explored via this new methodology, and the results are highlighted in this paper.