= FlexCRM Project =

== Computing Resource Management: Motivation ==

== Computing Resource Management: Motivation ==
SDR presents a hard real-time computing challenge. Taking into account the evolution of wireless systems it is clearly stated that whereas spectrum efficiency increases lineally its requirements in computing resources increases exponentially. Therefore, the flexibility, based on the reconfiguration capacity of terminals and network equipment, is based on capability of their reconfiguration managers, which need to track the states of the computing resources.

An SDR processing chain, SDR application or waveform, is the part of an SDR transceiver that is implemented in software. It can be understood as a set of concurrent processes that continuously process and propagate real-time data. Such a processing chain is not specifically tailored but rather executable on any general-purpose platform with sufficient computing capacity. Therefore, a mapping process, carrying out the task of assigning software modules to hardware resources, becomes the basis for the Computing Resource Management framework. Wireless and SDR systems, however, reveal specific aspects, essentially regarding flexibility and efficiency, that should be jointly considered:

  1. Time slot based division of the transmission medium (radio time slot);
  2. Continuous data transmission and reception;
  3. RAT-specific quality of service (QoS) targets;
  4. Real-time computing requirements and limited computing resources;
  5. Different constraints and computing loads for different RATs and radio conditions;
  6. Dynamic reconfiguration of the protocol stack, either partial or total;
  7. Heterogeneous multiprocessor execution platforms.


== Organization ==

Our computing resoure management proposal consist of several modules. These are illustrated in the figure below and are described in the corresponding links. The basis for the resource management is the [wiki:RealTimeManagement time management]. The SDR computing system modeling tracks the SDR platforms' available computing resource and the SDR applications' computing requirements ([wiki:ResourceModels computing resource modeling]). These models are used by a general-purpose algorithm and a specific cost function, which manages (keeps track of and updates) the available computing resources as a function of the given computing requirements ([wiki:BaseCRM_Algorithms computing resource management]).


  [[Image(CRM_org1.png, 400px, align=right)]]