Hardware-Accelerated Real-Time Stream Data Processing on Android with GNU Radio

Abstract

With the ever-increasing performance of smartphones and tablets, they become viable platforms for applications that were, in the past, only possible on desktops or laptops. In this paper, we study their applicability for real-Time stream-data processing, which is particularly interesting for Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications, enabling wireless measurement and experimentation campaigns on mobile platforms. To this end, we port GNU Radio, a state-of-Theart, open source, real-Time stream-data processing framework, to Android and evaluate its performance.We show that it is possible to fully benefit from available accelerators, i.e., Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) and the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which provide considerable speedups and allow for efficient implementations. As a general-purpose real-Time data processing framework, GNU Radio can provide the base for a wide range of applications. To demonstrate its flexibility, we provide example applications that implement FM and Wireless LAN (WLAN). Our toolchain is published as open source software, thus serving as an enabler for highly mobile SDR applications.