Integration of Dataflow optimization techniques into a software radio design framework

Application specific design frameworks, such as GNU Radio for software defined radio, facilitate fast design flows by leveraging the common application structures of particular domains and rich libraries of elements tailored to them. However, due to their focus on the application, implementations derived from these frameworks are often unable to take advantage of target platform features to achieve high performance. To apply more extensive optimizations, applications described in such frameworks can be refined to formal models, making them more amenable to analysis and optimization. In this work, we present a method for integrating GNU Radio with a dataflow design framework, the Dataflow Interchange Format (DIF). We describe a translation from GNU Radio applications into a formal dataflow model and the software infrastructure we have used to integrate the two software packages. This integration allows GNU Radio to employ a variety of dataflow schedulers to improve performance on existing applications. Furthermore, by applying formal models to the application and the target architecture, this integration should allow for target specific optimizations for additional performance and target flexibility.