MILCOM 09: SDR solution achieves breakthrough performance

Wind River announced [on 19 October] that it has collaborated with PrismTech in the development of a high-performance software defined radio (SDR) solution for the military and public sectors.

According to testing conducted by PrismTech, this combined SDR solution has demonstrated breakthrough performance on multiple processors from Freescale and Intel, including round trip times of less than 10 seconds to power up, initialize the platform, load waveform components, unload waveform components, and shut down the radio.

The solution combines Wind River’s VxWorks 6 real-time operating system with compliance to both Software Communication Architecture (SCA) 2.2.2 and POSIX PSE52 runtime libraries, with PrismTech’s Spectra SDR Operating Environment, including small form factor core framework and embedded ORB middleware. PrismTech’s Spectra SDR Operating Environment also operates with Wind River Linux, with comparable performance, which enables a wide range of complementary SDR applications and hardware platforms to be deployed.

PrismTech is testing the combined solution on leading hardware platforms, including ARM, Freescale, and Intel architectures, and is delivering comprehensive benchmarking documentation.

The combined SDR solution will allow developers of software defined radios to use commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) components that adhere to SCA software radio standards, enabling radio manufacturers to immediately meet stringent requirements of the military and public sectors. These standards are mandated by the US Department of Defense for Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JTRS) and validated by the JTRS Test and Evaluation Laboratory (JTEL). Standards compliance is fundamental to wireless interfaces and increasingly to the software architecture inside the radio. Standardization of the software architecture facilitates application software and radio waveform reuse and evolution across diverse hardware platforms, hence lowering development costs and shortening time-to-market for new radio functionality.

“This collaboration will help the shift from hardware-centric, proprietary radios, to software-controlled, reprogrammable, standards-based radios that offer maximum flexibility and value,” said Rob Hoffman, general manager, Aerospace and Defense, Wind River. “By using COTS platforms and tools, project managers can help manage the risks of one-off custom software developments by exploiting the tooling support; and robust testing, packaging, standards compliance, and professional support of commercial software products.”

Compliance with SDR standards is a complex issue with many mandatory requirements and involving multiple advanced technologies. Thus the efficient development and deployment of operating environments is extremely difficult without advanced tools and well-tested, well-packaged, and well-supported COTS software solutions. The combined Wind River and PrismTech SDR solution includes advanced tooling for modeling, code-generation, and compliance validation. This maximizes developer time on applications development rather than software infrastructure and tooling support. COTS products benefit from economies-of-scale, on-going development, and professional support not available with custom developments, reducing total lifecycle costs in multiple ways.

“Together the breakthrough performance and superior tooling of the combined software solution make it a best-in-class software development environment,” said Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech. “As well as superior performance, PrismTech’s Spectra product line also includes tooling to validate SCA compliance at both the architectural and unit test level, and generate SCA compliant artifacts.”