| The Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) is a family of modular, multi-band, networked software defined radios that are built on an international open standard called the Software Communications Architecture (SCA). The goal of the SCA is to allow waveform software portability so that waveforms can be developed once and used on multiple radio platforms.
SCA uses the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as the software bus to handle the interactions between waveform software components. However, various specialized processor classes such as digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) do not have the resources to support a CORBA-based environment. The Component Portability Specification (CPS – a.k.a Change Proposal 289) addresses this issue and extends the concepts of SCA and component-based programming into DSPs, FPGAs and ASICs. CPS allows for efficient communication with minimal overhead both within and between processor classes. It also makes the specifics of each processor class transparent to the waveform developer and offers the developers the technology to write truly re-usable code.
In MILCOM 2005, the authors explained the CPS in detail. This year, they propose to present a case study on an end-to-end waveform development on DSPs and FPGAs. The paper starts with the SCA model of a Reed Solomon Block Encoder from which the source code for the component will be generated, compiled for two different hardware environments, and executed. The paper demonstrates the workflow and tool chain for CPS-based software development and analyzes the cost and benefits.
The paper concludes with an enumeration of next steps required to further integrate signal processing tools into the development suite for specialized processor classes. |