Beggar A review on "ALOE: An open-source SDR execution environment with cognitive computing resource"

Author:
Gomez, I.; Marojevic, V.; Gelonch, A.;
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya

This paper appears in: Communications Magazine, IEEE
Issue Date: September 2011
Volume: 49 Issue:9
On page(s): 76 - 83
ISSN: 0163-6804
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/MCOM.2011.6011737
Date of Current Version: 08 September 2011
Sponsored by: IEEE Communications Society

Full article access:

IEEE Xplore - Aloe: An open-source SDR execution environment with cognitive computing resource

Summary

Due to the diversification of the wireless environment, it led to the development of software-defined radio (SDR). SDR is a multistandard, multiservice, and multiband radio which is software-reconfigurable, and this helps deploying the most suitable waveform according to the environment stimuli and management policies.

The two most popular SDR frameworks are the software communications architecture (SCA) and GNU Radio. However, due to their decreased performance on digital signal processing applications and resource-constrained platforms, the abstraction layer and operating environment (ALOE) can be one of the substitute candidates on SDR framework.

This article presented the design goals, concepts and functionalities, architecture and services, application modules, and computing resource management capabilities of ALOE. It also compared ALOE with SCA and GNU Radio.

Comments

According to the article, SDR applications may need to work on several devices, what Beggar A worry about is if ALOE can work well with the continuous development of the hardware. When the hardware develop, their architecture will also changes overtime, therefore the existing application need to optimize for the new hardware. It is still need time to prove if ALOE can easily optimized with new hardware.

We can see a good result in ALOE when compare with the SCA and GNU Radio, but Beggar A doubt that if the performance gain can overcome the extra cost on switching the existing platform. Also, the development difficulties on SDR application under ALOE is also a concern.

Finally, for the evaluation on the performance of the ALOE platform, the team use an unknown sound card act as the ADC/DAC, which Beggar A uncertain about the performance of that sound card. It is better to provide a little bit more details on sound card, for example, the phase noise, etc.