Tick: Programmable Low-Latency SDR System


Introduction

Tick is a new SDR system that provides programmability and ensures low latency at both PHY and MAC. It supports modular design and element-based programming, similar to the Click router framework. It uses an accelerator-rich architecture, where an embedded processor executes control flows and handles various MAC events. User-defined accelerators offload those tasks, which are either computation-intensive or communication-heavy, or require fine-grained timing control, from the processor, and accelerate them in hardware. Tick applies a number of hardware and software co-design techniques to ensure low latency, including multi-clock-domain pipelining, field-based processing pipeline, separation of data and control flows, etc. We have implemented Tick and validated its effectiveness through extensive evaluations as well as two prototypes of 802.11ac SISO/MIMO and 802.11a/g full-duplex.

Publication

The Tick Programmable Low-Latency SDR System  ACM MobiCom'17

Haoyang Wu, Tao Wang, Zengwen Yuan, Chunyi Peng, Zhiwei Li, Zhaowei Tan, Boyan Ding, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanjie Li, Jun Liu, Songwu Lu
The 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

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Research Support

We gratefully acknowledge research support from NSF (CNS-1423576 and CNS-1526985) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Grants 61370056 and 61531004.