Sbir phase i: massively parallel protocols for software-based wireless systems

This SBIR Phase I project, awarded by the National Science Foundation (CFDA 47.084 - NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships), aims to develop massively parallel protocols for software-based wireless systems. The $273,383 award, granted on September 15, 2023, will enable Lutris, Inc., the for-profit awardee, to demonstrate the feasibility of using commodity computing hardware and specially designed software to implement radio processing tasks at high speed. This approach has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of building radio systems, such as cellular LTE and 5G base stations, by eliminating the need for custom silicon chips. The project also seeks to address bottlenecks in communications protocols and explore opportunities to redesign protocols to enhance performance. The work is expected to be completed by August 31, 2024. No sub-awards are planned for this project.

Abstract

The broader/commercial impact of this small business innovation research (sbir) phase i project lies in its potential to implement state-of-the-art radio communication systems faster and less expensively. Radio systems are an essential part of everyday life, serving roles from entertainment to public safety. But modern radio systems, designed to use the limited number of available frequencies efficiently, are expensive to develop and deploy. A major reason for the high cost is that custom silicon chips are needed to do the processing that converts a weak radio signal into useful data. This project aims to make radio systems much cheaper to build. Instead of building custom chips, the team uses commodity computers and specially designed software that can run the radio processing tasks at high speed. This speed is enabled by technology that analyzes radio processing tasks and turns them into software which runs on a processor with many individual computing cores. The economic impact is twofold: that technology can reduce the cost of existing systems, such as cellular LTE and 5G base stations, IT also makes possible new applications which are too expensive to build from custom hardware. This sbir phase i project seeks to understand how to develop the processing needed in modern radio system quickly and efficiently. The team also seeks to address the features of communications protocols that are hard to implement because the computations are too complicated or too much data needs to be examined before the final output is generated. They will also address the opportunities to change the protocol to eliminate the bottlenecks. The technology will measure the how fast key radio algorithms run on commodity computing hardware and how much time is spent on essential, but not productive, tasks such as moving data between memories. The objective is a quantitative estimate of how much data can be transmitted or received by a radio implemented purely in software. Ultimately, the team will design protocols that scale with the number of processor cores: twice as many processors giving twice the data throughput. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are not planned for this award.