A Dsp Acceleration Framework For Software-Defined Radios On X86_64

This paper presents a DSP acceleration and assessment framework targeting SDR platforms on x86_64 architectures. Driven by the potential of rapid prototyping and evaluation of breakthrough concepts that these platforms provide, our work builds upon the well-known OpenAirInterface codebase, extending it for advanced, previously unsupported modes towards large and massive MIMO such as non-codebook-based multi-user transmissions. We then develop an acceleration/profiling framework, through which we present fine-grained execution results for DSP operations. Incorporating the latest SIMD instructions, our acceleration framework achieves a unitary speedup of up to 10x. Integrated into OpenAirInterface, it accelerates computationally expensive MIMO operations by up to 88% across tested modes. Besides resulting in a useful tool for the community, this work provides insight on runtime DSP complexity and the potential of modern x86_64 systems.