Virtual Machine for Software Defined Radio: Evaluating the Software VM Approach

We study the impact of using a virtual machine for the configuration of radio physical layer protocols on a real hardware platform: the Magali chip. The virtual machine is programmed in software on the ARM processor present on the platform. We evaluate the additional cost of the virtual machine layer on the effective implementation of telecommunication physical layer protocols. The results, obtained using the mixed SystemC/VHDL cycle accurate simulator of the Magali platform, show that, although the proof of concept is valid and functional, extra optimizations, such as additional hardware mechanisms, will be necessary to obtain real-time performance.