ICE-T: RC: Orchestration and Reconfiguration Control Architecture for Software Defined Radios

在过去的30年里，无线网络得到了巨大的发展，影响了许多行业，包括电信、应急响应和娱乐。在不久的将来，无线技术的进步可能会从根本上改变多个行业，包括制造业、汽车行业、医疗保健、辅助生活、公共活动、家庭自动化和公用事业。然而，每个行业都有不同的，往往是相反的无线需求。 制造业通常需要机器之间的低数据速率、超低延迟的闭环通信，而新兴的人与人之间的增强现实交互具有更大的数据量，但可以容忍更高的延迟。如今，应用和服务仅限于少数无线技术，如4G、Wi-Fi和蓝牙，因为开发和修改新的无线电协议需要许多人年。无线社区面临的挑战是使无线网络具有与常规计算设备（如笔记本电脑或电话）相同的灵活性，其中相同的硬件支持在软件中实现的近乎无限的各种行为。无线层面的灵活性已经落后，因为无线电已经被实现为固定功能电路，以最大限度地减少边际成本，能源使用和网络延迟。实现这种灵活性将为不同应用领域的新无线功能提供机会。虽然新兴的软件定义无线电（SDR）领域已经朝着这一愿景取得了进展，但最近的结果表明，传统SDR存在严重的局限性。主要问题是即使使用多核中央处理器（CPU）或图形处理器（GPU），与专用集成电路（ASIC）或现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）中的快速执行和高度并行化相比，顺序执行速度也较慢。本研究将探讨和评估一种新的软件抽象，动态块（DB），它将实现许多软件抽象在SDR FPGA，包括过程调用，递归，排队，动态路由，共享内存和矩阵代数。在FPGA中实现这些抽象将使开发人员能够快速尝试新设计或修改现有设计，同时满足实时延迟和低能耗要求。该项目将使用毫米波（mmWave）场景来评估使用DB编程的实时SDR。Rutgers大学ORBIT试验台上的SDR以及最近资助的COSMOS平台和欧盟合作伙伴的未来毫米波设备将成为这项研究的目标平台。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Wireless networks have grown enormously during the past 30 years, impacting numerous industries, including telecommunications, emergency response, and entertainment. Wireless advances could radically change several industries in the near future, including manufacturing, the automotive industry, healthcare, assisted living, public events, home automation, and utilities. However, each industry has different, often opposing, wireless demands. Manufacturing often requires a low data rate, ultra-low latency closed loop communication between machines, while emerging augmented reality interactions between people have much larger large data volumes, but can tolerate higher latency. Today, applications and services are constrained to a handful of wireless technologies, such as 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, because developing and modifying new radio protocols requires many man-years. The challenge for the wireless community is to enable wireless networks the same flexibility as regular computing devices, such as laptops or phones, where the same hardware supports a near infinite variety of behaviors realized in software. Flexibility at the wireless level has lagged as radios have been implemented as fixed-function circuits, in order to minimize marginal cost, energy use, and network latency. Enabling such flexibility would open opportunities for new wireless functions in diverse application domains. While the emerging field of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) has made progress toward this vision, recent results have shown that traditional SDRs suffer serious limitations. The main problem is the slower sequential execution, even when using multicore central processing units (CPUs) or graphics processing units (GPUs), in contrast to the fast execution and high parallelization in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs)or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This research will explore and evaluate a new software abstraction, Dynamic Blocks (DB), which will realize many software abstractions in an SDR FPGA, including procedure calls, recursion, queuing, dynamic routing, shared memory and matrix algebra. Realizing these abstractions in FPGAs will allow developers to rapidly try new designs or modify existing ones while meeting real-time latency and low energy requirements. The project will use millimeter-wave (mmWave) scenarios to evaluate real-time SDRs programmed using DBs. The SDRs available in the ORBIT testbed at Rutgers University, and the future mmWave capable equipment from the recently-funded COSMOS platform and European Union partners would be the target platforms for this research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.