Resource Virtualization with Programmable Radio Processing Platform

As wireless communication moves to all IP and packet based processing, the virtualization techniques will need to be introduced to provide common interface to higher layers which will hide the necessary details for resource reservations and sharing. In the circuit switched world the communication resources are guarantied with the allocation of channels that satisfy certain bandwidth requirements, where the allocated bandwidth is taken regardless of the actual utilization. In the IP packet based world the reservations have a soft form with statistical guaranties allowing dynamic sharing of bandwidth, while the bandwidth is requested by setting the Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameters. Setting up SLA parameters and monitoring their compliance can take complex forms, so it is advantageous to abstract the SLA related communication from the higher networking layers and shield them from the changes in the environment and system load. The virtualization is even more important for the reconfigurable and programmable devices suitable for cognitive radio applications. The changes in frequency band, modulation scheme, or other baseband and MAC protocols characteristics need to be monitored by the virtualization layer which is responsible for mapping original SLA of each flow to the new settings. We present the novel programmable radio processing platform architecture framework, Virtual Flow Pipelining – FVP, which has underlying mechanisms for per flow performance guaranties. The SLA guaranties are enforced per flow using the scheduling mechanisms that will allocate proportional share of each hardware resource to the flow. The allocations of the resource share to the flow create the Virtual Flow consisting of the sequence of processing steps on the required processing modules. The wireless protocol processing often imposes end to end latency requirements for the whole processing flow, so the resource scheduler need to take the full flow latency into account as well.