Enabling protocol coexistence: hardware-software codesign of wireless transceivers on heterogeneous computing architectures.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20249265

In an increasingly interconnected world, there has been an explosion in the number of wireless devices in the Internet of Things. This recent increase in wireless devices has been accompanied by a rising number of protocols for wireless communications, each focusing on different purposes such as execution time reduction, energy reduction, handling higher congestion levels, or operation at different bandwidths. This increase has also caused heavy congestion on particular bandwidths. Due to spectrum scarcity, the need has arisen for these devices to operate on the same bandwidths. However, existing wireless devices are inflexible and have no capabilities to coexist with devices using other protocols. Software-Defined Radios (SDR) have introduced new platforms for dynamically modifying wireless system designs, and heterogeneous computing has enabled implementation on different computing elements. Until now, researchers have focused on designing complete protocol-specific processing chains on static computing architectures. However, SDR has opened the door for flexibility in wireless transceivers, and heterogeneous computing systems can be used to meet the needs for lower execution time and power consumption.