Multi-granularity NoC Simulation Framework for Early Phase Exploration of SDR Hardware Platforms

Abstract

Software-defined radio (SDR) terminals are critical to enable concrete and consecutive inter-working between fourth generation wireless access systems or communication modes. The next generation of SDR terminals is intended to have heavy hardware resource requirements and switching between them will introduce dynamism in respect with timing and size of resource requests. This paper presents a system-level framework which combines a cycle-accurate NoC (Network-on-Chip) simulation environment with a pre-existing SDR simulator, thus enabling a cycle accurate simulation and exploration of such complex, dynamic hardware/software SDR designs. The platform specifications are represented as a virtual architecture by a coarse-grain simulator described in SystemC that includes a set of configuration parameters. The key of our approach is that our simulator environment provides automatic wrapper tools able to explore the SDR platform parameters and simultaneously transmit the interconnection traffic in a cycle-accurate NoC simulator giving the opportunity to examine the impact of different topologies at the system bandwidth at execution time. Our simulation results have shown that we can achieve remarkable improvement at the final performance (65-40%) choosing at the early design phase specific platform configurations.