Green Hills and Objective Interface Systems Announce Breakthrough in Software Defined Radio Optimization

“While the promise of dynamic interoperability and reconfigurability enabled by SDRs is impressive, developers have been challenged to meet the stringent resource and performance requirements often associated with mobile radio technology,” commented David Kleidermacher, Chief Technology Officer, Green Hills Software. “This optimization technique, with its powerful impact on software footprint, will ease the plight of the SDR software developer and enable a compelling price-performance proposition for both designers and end users. Objective Interface is a first-class engineering organization. This collaboration is typical of their commitment to solving the total customer problem.”

“We have long partnered with Green Hills Software on the tight integration between our respective middleware and operating system run-time environments. We have now extended our collaboration, focusing on improvement of the entire development cycle for resource-critical SDR systems,” commented Bill Beckwith, CEO/CTO of Objective Interface Systems. “Three years ago our software defined radio customers recognized that we had the smallest footprint in the industry, and asked us to find a new solution to further optimize size reductions in the rest of their radios.”

Some companies in the industry have chosen to use the technique, “subsetting.” They subset both the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard and the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) standard, removing functionality in order to achieve their performance objectives. Subsetting, however, has two fundamental problems:
• Developers must speculate at which functionality to remove, resulting in inadequate functionality or artificial restraints for many radios or waveforms;
• When deviating from the standards, any conformance suite like the JTRS Technology Laboratory (JTeL) JTRS Test Application (JTAP) test suite, will fail.

Beckwith continued, “After rigorous engineering requirements discussions, a new method was created to automatically remove unused C++ virtual functions.” The resulting extensions to Green Hills Software’s MULTI development tools automatically optimize the size of the system, dramatically reducing the size of existing SCA implementations without shortchanging radio designs by departing from standards.

Software defined radios are built using middleware called the SCA, an open architecture framework that governs the structure and operation of the radio, enabling it to dynamically load and run waveforms and be networked into an integrated system. A typical SCA is built upon CORBA distributed communications services – ORBexpress® - provided by Objective Interface Systems and a POSIX-conformant operating system - INTEGRITY - provided by Green Hills Software. The breadth of functionality provided by the SCA results in a sophisticated software platform that may occupy significant computing resources on the radio, placing a strain on size, weight and power (SWaP).

Dan Mender, Director of Business Development for Green Hills, further discussed his company’s collaboration with Objective Interface: “Numerous major SDR projects use Objective Interface’s ORBexpress CORBA solution with Green Hills INTEGRITY RTOS. Teaming with Objective Interface to further optimize our toolset for SDR made perfect sense. Now we can enable highly-optimized footprint solutions for our many SCA customers without adding risk, scheduling delays, and headaches to their projects caused in a past by custom modifications to standard SCA frameworks attempting to reduce the deployed SDR memory footprint.”

As an early adopter of the SCA, the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) has been involved in the evolution and adaptation of the specification. “As the leading provider of SCA core frameworks and waveform development tools in use today, we applaud this joint effort to address the challenges of SDR deployment,” said Claude Bélisle, VP of Satellite Communications and Radio Propagation at the CRC, a long-time partner of Green Hills and Objective Interface Systems. “Our mutual customers will appreciate the value this optimization brings to their development and production efforts.”

The optimization technique identifies and deletes unused portions of this SCA framework, yielding a 50% reduction in memory usage.