Platform And Software for Terminals: Operationally Re-configurAbLe

The purpose of this document is to explain the concept of a Software Definable Radio (SDR) terminal in frame of multi standard environment addressed in the PASTORAL project. This is public document summarising all WP1 deliverables. It's cover system requirements , SDR terminal performance and macro-architecture description. The document is available for public dissemination.

The PASTORAL project, under the European Commission's 5th framework programme for the Information Society. It starts by briefly reviewing the subject background, and explaining the aims of the project. The relevant background issues are the pressure from users and operators for product evolution, capacity increase and cost reduction, the rise of Third Generation (3G) standardisation, and the attempts by certain collaborative bodies (such as the SDR Forum) to rationalise the problems of re-configurable radio systems, the definitions of sub-system parts and the classification of potential solutions. This deliverable then defines terms used in the rest of the project. The broad aim of project PASTORAL is the creation of a re-configurable emulator for the physical layer of a terminal, addressing W-CDMA and TD-CDMA, and driven by compatibility with GSM and S-UMTS. This project principally follows the standards of 3GPP, the 3G standards forum with the greatest European content and relevance. The consortium predicts that the available market will be grater in the short-term for 3GPP-compliant UEs. 3GPP is the source of W-CDMA, TD-CDMA and S-UMTS. Services and applications are explored in relation to 3G standards, those enabled by SDR are suggested, and the generic services of an SDR system are related to the physical terminal. The document describes the procedures necessary for update of SDR systems, where update can be by several routes (such as Over The Air (OTA) or via smartcard), and explains the issues of each method such as security, reliability, billing). Each layer below the SDR-CU is examined, and requirements are presented for the PASTORAL terminal emulator as an example. The current activities of three important industry bodies (MexE, WAP Forum and SDR Forum) are summarised as a more detailed background picture, and it is seen that the environment of the PASTORAL project is clearly not yet stable: this is a healthy situation and an opportunity. The document ends by drawing conclusions and stating open issues. The main conclusions are: - 3GPP is the key standards body in terms of market leverage - As the standards activity in 3G becomes more mature, there is still a need for re-configurable products as a risk-reducer (of market-risk as well as of technology-risk) - Time pressure is increased in the light of the investments that operators have made in purchasing 3G licences - Java and similar derivative languages are attractive as a means for defining functional blocks above the physical layer - Off-terminal compilation of functional blocks is attractive to keep the terminals 'slim' - SDR products are uniquely well able to address certain services: updateable processing software, VAS, standards un-gradable on the UE. Identified open issues are: - Type approval uncertainty of procedure and scope - Environmental definition from SDR Forum and other bodies.

The Java platform of the Pastoral project's demonstrator will be a hybrid platform: As the Pastoral JVM will be mainly used to handle the download of software packages, it will have less real-time requirements as if it were involved in the wireless stack layers. Although we have studied carefully the two competing approaches, Real-time Specifications from Sun & IBM, and the Core Specifications from the J-Consortium, the actual Virtual Machine of the Pastoral demonstrator will most probably come from the embedded field rather than the real-time field. Nevertheless, as the networking will come through the wireless stack, the Virtual Machine and its libraries will require some adaptation to the demonstrators feature to handle network services. The rest of the general-purpose library classes will come from the low-footprint kilo-Virtual Machines profiles like CLDC/MIDP. Those profiles are targeted at user-space application with no real-time constraints. One of the key issues is Threading & Synchronisation. In order to keep responsiveness and determinism at an acceptable level for Pastoral, an important point is the interaction between the OS and the JVM models for Threads and Synchronisation.

This document describe the Pastoral Software Defined Radio Control Unit developed by Silicomp within the Pastoral Project. The SDR-CU framework is made of three related technologies: A number of Servlet to deploy on Web servers. These servers deliver SDR-CU Module compilation information and Module binaries over the Internet. A build environment that allows to create and package interconnected binaries SDR-CU modules from local C source code and C headers delivered by the web servers. The SDR-CU per se, which sits on a target User Equipment and is able to manage Configuration and Binaries Modules directly on the device. These three technologies are written mostly in Java.

First results obtained on prototyping a radio-reconfigurable front end between 2G-3G standards. The mechanisms of reconfiguration have been defined and are to be implemented on a prototype platform, with the partners of the project.

The strategy of the present deliverable is to highlight, at all the level of the Pastoral design flow, the "today co-simulation tools specification and capability" and then, to describe the design flow to be used in this project to face the system design process and the following design and co-simulation environments. Much attention has been spent about the use of heterogeneous environment, because this is the typical situation that arose with many partners with many different tools and operating systems. These environment specifications deliverable will support design before and after hardware and software partitioning and it will be re-used and disseminate also in next projects. In this context, TILAB has also analysed and developed a real time analysis software in order to performs an evaluation of the algorithm tasks complexity, in which each task is expressed in MIPS, and afterwards, once a specific architecture is chosen, checks if the code can be processed in software or must be mapped in hardware. As consequence these results will allow an innovative approach in all that projects that require a fast design flow having at the same time heterogeneous CAD environments and strong time-to-market needs.

Since the beginning of the project TILAB has created, kept and expanded a Pastoral WEB site in order to give visibility to the international community about the project activities and its results. This deliverable describes the WEB site hardware and software structure, the WEB contents and the auxiliary services and all the HTML code has been released. The official PASTORAL WEB site has address: http://www.ist-pastoral.org and its server (212.53.89.138) reflects the visitor on the real double WEB servers at TILAB premises. The PASTORAL WEB site is stored on two-balanced servers in TILAB. This structure allows distributing the client request load so that the best speed is always guaranteed. Keeping in account the goal of the PASTORAL WEB Site, it has been decided to adopt a Hierarchical Web Cluster. This usually features a series of author-defined paths, all of which start from a common point, i.e. a home page. The pattern followed is a "top-down" hierarchy of pages. All documents are linked under a common home page. Linked documents can cover a main topic where a topic overview is given, followed by sequential or even hierarchical subtopics with the topic detail, containing information and media. The menu arguments are: Objectives, Partners, Public Area, Private Area, Reviewer Area, Whats New and Contact Us. In the Public Area are released Cluster and IST summit documents and the PASTORAL deliverables published as "Public". It's important to pay attention to the fact that there is also a link named "IST Related Projects" where it's possible to find useful information about IST projects related to PASTORAL project. The Private Area contains all the PASTORAL deliverables (draft and final) written by the partners as "confidential" status. So, in order to access it a password is requested. The Reviewer Area is similar to the Private Area but it contains only the official PASTORAL deliverables (not draft), and its access is permitted only to the Program Officer and to the reviewer with another specific password known only by the TILAB administrator. So, in this way the change "on the fly" of the official deliverables is denied. All the downloadable files are in ZIP format. Of course this site is a good dissemination means and thousands of visitors have been detected from any part of Europe.

The Pastoral project includes the use of significant hardware with tight real-time constraints: FPGAs, DSP, MCU. The MCU¿s tasks are to synchronise all the high-level tasks with the related communication between software and hardware, and to give the infrastructure on top of which reconfiguration capabilities will be built. In the context of the pastoral demonstration, a particular hardware/software partitioning will be studied. Re-configurable mobile radio L1 will be implemented on top of FPGAs and DSP, higher re-configurable layers on top of the MCU as software modules. Even though a RTOS greatly will improve the ease of software development, some of its requirements are typically dependent on the hardware behaviour and expectations. This means that this document not only deals with feature of pastoral-class devices, but also with specificities of the Pastoral demonstrator, the needs of the SDR-CU, and the capabilities of its chosen eCos operating system.

Deliverables

Share this page

Download