A contribution to bridge the design gap between software and hardware for complex signal processing systems in mobile communications

Mobile communication platforms for current communication standards like UMTS, WLAN require high performance with low power consumption. This can be achieved either with specific optimized hardware, or with new hardware concepts supporting a high degree of parallel general purpose units. The latter is preferred because of high flexibility in implementation of different algorithms. The most promising architecture is the Software Defined Radio (SDR), where all algorithms are implemented in software. But the diversity and incompatibility of architectures of SDR platforms makes the software development process unique and expensive, and frustrates or makes impossible the porting of software from one platform onto another. This dissertation describes a programming concept and a design approach for SDR platforms. It allows development of portable software for SDR platforms with different architectures. The software development process is separated into two different steps. Firstly, an application is described in a hardware independent way. Secondly, this description is transformed into a hardware specific application. The concept offers a language that allows abstraction from the implementation details. This language is called Virtual Radio Engine (VRE). It describes the communication application in terms of functional primitives and their superstructures and avoids description of the scheduling schemes and mappings on processing units for those applications. Instead of scheduling schemes and mappings the concept introduces so-called scheduling restrictions, which show dependencies between components based on synchronous and asynchronous information exchange. As a proof of concept a MAC layer of the WLAN protocol stack is first described as a hardware independent model and then the generated code is ported to real hardware.