A case study of simulation and performance evaluation of a SDR baseband architecture

International audienceApplication of Software Defined Radio (SDR) principles to mobile devices faces numerous opposing constraints including low power, low cost, and high performance. This situation motivates the definition of advanced methods, models, and tools in order to maintain the design complexity of terminal architectures. In this context, architects of next generation radio communication systems aim at designing SDR baseband architectures able to support a wide variety of communication interfaces with a wide range of processing resources and that fully meet expected requirements. As a result, it is mandatory to efficiently assist system architects in the process of evaluating performances of potential architectures and in exploration of the design space. In this paper, we present a case study representative of next generation radio communication systems and we describe its modeling and evaluation of performances of the related architecture. The case study corresponds to an adaptive multi-standard and multi-application radio communication system. Performance evaluation is performed following a simulation-based approach. Modeling techniques are proposed to facilitate estimation of expected resources according to complex use case scenarios and to allow achieving a good compromise between simulation speed of architecture models and accuracy of provided estimations. The presented results concern the evolution over time of the architecture and the observation of resource usage taking into account dynamic changes of the system environment