Benchmarking and Profiling the GNURadio Scheduler

Abstract

From a technical perspective, GNURadio has two main assets: its comprehensive block library of optimized, state-of-the-art signal processing algorithms and its runtime environment. The latter manages the data flow and turns GNURadio in a real-time signal processing framework. In contrast to the block library, where it is easy to replace blocks with more efficient implementations, the runtime grew organically, which resulted in a complex system that is hard to maintain. At the same time, there are concerns about its performance. To understand the current implementation and explore opportunities for future improvements, we provide benchmarking and profiling results. We, furthermore, compare the performance of GNURadio’s default with a manually optimized configuration to show the potential of a more advanced scheduler.