Dealing with the requirements of reconfigurable radio architectures in the vehicular domain is a very challenging task. Solutions can be found in the context of Software Defined Radio (SDR). Under its umbrella, flexible hardware platforms that support a wide range of different wireless communication standards are designed. One of them is the OpenAirInterface ExpressMIMO platform that is developed by Eurecom and Télécom ParisTech.
Main objectives of this thesis are to propose the first receiver chain prototype for ExpressMIMO, to assess the applicability of the platform for latency critical standards, to identify design bottlenecks and to propose and implement solutions to overcome the identified limitations. Standard of interest in this context is IEEE 802.11p which is required for the Car-to-Car communication.
Our analysis reveals that the Front-End Processing (FEP) DSP engine is heavily charged and that the required configuration time outreaches the pure execution time for short vectors. To meet this challenge we introduce an Application Specific Instruction-Set Processor (ASIP) as the solution of choice when dealing with strong latency requirements.
To complete the receiver chain we further present a first Preprocessor prototype which connects the external A/D and D/A converters with the remaining baseband engine. In this context we focus on a generic, flexible and hardware optimized Sample Rate Converter (SRC) that is operating on fractional ratios.
As the combination of Car-to-Car and Car-to-Infrastructure communications within only device enables various new applications for future cars we finally investigate on a possible multimodal execution of 802.11p and DAB on the chosen target platform.
