A high performance GPU-based software-defined basestation

We present a high performance GPU-based software-defined basestation. The key idea is to explore the feasibility of using GPU as a baseband processor for supporting software-defined basestation to achieve both real-time high performance and high reconfigurability, considering the numerous computing resources and flexible programming interface of GPU. Based on an existing WARPLab SDR framework, we put effort on the exploration of the data level parallelism and algorithm level parallelism of baseband kernels for GPU acceleration, as well as the task level parallelism in the system for the task pipelining of packet data transfer and data processing. As a case study, an OFDM system is implemented to better demonstrate the concept of our system architecture and optimization strategies. In this case, our GPU-based basestation can not only achieve less than 3ms latency and more than 50Mbps throughput for processing streaming frames in real-time, but also offer software-defined flexibility and scalability for supporting future wireless standards.