Meta-model Driven Reverse Engineering Approach to Ensure the Waveform Portability

International audienceA fundamental feature of the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) is the separation of waveforms from the radio's operating environment (OE). Since waveform portability is not a fully resolved problem in Software Defined Radio (SDR), this work take into account several software radio implementations and ensure the portability and the conformity to SCA standard. The goal is to develop a validation tool for checking the design rules and the degree of validation of the waveform portability and applying the methodology on part of the FM3TR waveform models. This paper focuses on the analysis of the executives parameters in the OE. This analysis is essential to be used in a methodology of reverse engineering. Indeed, we seek to identify problems of the waveform portability and especially CORBA compliant components underlying software technologies. In this paper, the investigation is focused on several fields related with the waveform component design, such as: CORBA, ORB, IDL, component implementation, synchronization mechanism, execution model and pipeline problem. As each supplier has its own waveform development process, our goal is not to require a specific process from developers but to define a methodology based on the reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is concerned with recovering models from the codes of different SCA application vendors. Using these models allow to raise the abstraction level by viewing the program from the perspective of the concepts it implements. This enables a higher degree of automation in the reverse engineering endeavor. Therefore, based on a common metamodel, which acts as a mediator among the different representations, once the existing conflicts and similarities are identified, a transformation methodology and patterns are presented. This allows adapting the SCA coding model between two vendors and ensures better waveform portability