Study on Implementing OpenCL in Common GNURadio Blocks

Abstract

Software Defined Radio (SDR) has opened up a world of research and development into broad radio frequency (RF) communications and brought affordable hardware and open source software to the world. However as other real-world radio solutions continue to push for greater bandwidth such as satellite communications meeting or exceeding 100 Mbps and new wireless LAN technologies with 80 MHz-wide channels, these solutions implemented in hardware are a challenge to implement with the same throughput in SDR for real-time processing. One option to provide additional throughput capabilities to SDR is to leverage those graphics cards that are present in many computers along with their highly capable, massively parallel GPU's to supplement CPU-based calculations. This study and corresponding GNURadio OOT project (named "gr-clenabled") is not the first project to evaluate this option. However, the unique goal of this project is to provide a more comprehensive and practical implementation of as many common blocks as possible along with providing quantitative timing analysis to study the benefit (or degradation) in performance while running on GPU's.