Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Soft-DVB has a Brother. A Receiving Brother. And Fast...

[Alexander Chemeris]

Hi Vincenzo,

That's interesting.
Can you point to some description or this "MAgic" technology? From your
description I'm not sure I understand even on what level it works and what
it actually does :)

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:04, Vincenzo Pellegrini <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi GNURadio fellows,
> considering that this list has grown to something highly relevant in
> Software Defined Radio I thought it would have been a good idea to share
> here a few thoughts I've been having since long and as well as a result that
> was just achieved.
>
>
> Since a few months after my first approach to SDR in 2006,
> I thought I picked up two major facts about the technology:
> .:.  SDR infinite potential lying for sure in its flexibility but, even more
> relevantly,  in its ability to bypass
>      the costly HW-level design stage which is embedded in any traditional
> radio design/production process
> .:.  Its equally infinite power-inefficiency compared to traditional,
> HW-implemented competitor technologies.
>      In fact, ease of development as well as flexibility appear to be
> inversely proportional to power efficiency.
> The latter being in my opinion the reason for which SDR has been growing for
> ages up to now but has never "exploded" as we could expect from a technology
> cutting away a conspicuous part of the design costs of any radio system.
> Actually, flexibility and cost-efficiency, though considerable, do not
> appear to be sufficient motivation for accepting to upscale power
> requirements (at a given computational cost yielded by the implemented
> wireless standard) by a factor which typically is in [100 ; 300].
> Whether right or wrong, by working with these thoughts in mind, during the
> research I'm carrying on at the University of Pisa, Italy while doing my PhD
> here, I developed a novel implementation technique targeted at
> software-implemented Signal Processing over General Purpose CPUs or DSPs
> which we (at DSPCoLa lab, http://dspcola.iet.unipi.it ) call "MA".
> Current research results have shown that MA was able to increase by slightly
> more than one order of magnitude the power efficiency of a traditionally
> implemented (MA-free) SDR.
>
> By applying such "MA" technology to the ETSI DVB-T receiver chain with the
> help of:
> Mario Di Dio (former master thesis student, now PhD Student  at DSPCoLa)
> Luca ROSE    (former master thesis student at DSPCoLa, now PhD student at
> Supélec Paris)
> we obtained the receiving companion of Soft-DVB: SR-DVB.
> Standing for Software Receiver - DVB,
> SR-DVB is a fully software (all signal processing is done in pure C++ over
> the host computer) ETSI DVB-T receiver  capable of running realtime
> while providing 11.612 Mbps throughput
> and absorbing less than 50% of computational resources available over an
> Intel Q9400, 2.66 GHz CPU.
> As long as MA was applied only to the two computationally-heaviest blocks of
> the receive chain (i.e. Viterbi Decoding and OFDM synch), we believe that
> considerable margins for improvement of the presented result do exist. They
> will be explored in the next months.
>
> SR-DVB will be presented in Karlsruhe at WSR 10
> as the article:
> "A Fully Software ETSI DVB-T Receiver Based on the USRP"
> during such presentation also MA technology will be briefly outlined.
> A demo video of our proof-of-concept receiver is available at
> www.legalepellegrini.it/ing/SR-DVB_demo_long.VRO
> as usual, mplayer or VLC wil play this camcorder mpeg2 viedo easily.
>
> Best regards to all writers and readers of the list
> vincenzo
>
>
>
>
> --
> Vincenzo Pellegrini
> http://www.youtube.com/user/wwvince1
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
> address@hidden
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>
>



-- 
Regards,
Alexander Chemeris.