An environment for (re)configuration and execution management of heterogeneous flexible radio platforms

This paper presents the Flexible Radio Kernel (FRK), a configuration and execution management environment for hybrid hardware/software flexible radio platforms. The aim of FRK is to manage platform reconfiguration for multi-mode, multi-standard operation, with different levels of abstraction.A high level framework is defined and described. Its goal is to manage multiple Medium Access Control layers and to enable cooperation algorithms for cognitive radio. A low-level environment is also available to manage platform reconfiguration for radio operations. Radios can make use of hardware or software elements, and configuration state is hidden to the high-level layers, offering pseudo concurrency (time sharing) properties independently of the nature of the elements implementation. This study presents a global view of FRK, with a specific focus on its software architecture and its support of configurable hardware. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through a practical example.