Universal Waveform Generation Tool Study UWGT
EDA File Reference: 09-ARM-003
Universal Waveform Generation Tool Study
UWGT
WP 0 Executive Summary
Partner Name
Short Name
Country
1
Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG
R&S
Germany
2
Elektrobit Wireless Communications LTD
EB
Finland
3
Indra Sistemas
INDRA
Spain
4
SAAB AB (publ), Saab Systems
SAAB
Sweden
5
Thales Communications SA
TCF
France
Version 1.2
July 11, 2011
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EDA File Reference: 09-ARM-003
Editions
Edition
Date
Authors
Modification
V0.0
11/01/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
WP0 initialized
V0.1
25/01/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
some modifications and clarifications
V0.2
27/04/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
continue
09/05/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
WP5 and WP4 summary included:
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
WP2 summary included:
V0.4
10/05/11
13/05/11
V0.5
16/05/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
Improvements proposed by Rafael
Aguado /16 May integrated
V0.6
23/05/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
Reworked
V 0.7
23/05/11
Arne Berglund Saab
WP1 summary reworked
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
Reworked
Improvements proposed by A. Berglund/12 May integrated
Integrated improvements by EB
(23.May) and TCF (24.May)
V0.8
25/05/11
V0.9
27/05/11
Ruediger Leschhorn, R&S
Reworked and prepared for final review and approval
V1.1
07/07/11
Winfried Bongart
Final w/o changes
V1.2
11/07/11
Winfried Bongart
Final w/o changes
Shortened Ch 5 part
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Table of Contents
0
Executive Summary .............................................................................................................. 4
List of Figures
Figure 1: The MARTES approach ................................................................................................ 7
Figure 2: Model- and tool chain.................................................................................................... 9
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0.
Executive Summary
The main, high level objective of the customer (represented by the different stakeholders on
customer side) is to achieve radio communications (interoperability) with minimum cost and
within the planned time frame.
The question arises whether common use of processes and tools for waveform development in
the several domains (military, public safety, commercial) will positively influence waveform design and development in terms of time and costs, and porting efficiency (interoperability and
effort).
The main goal of the UMGT study is to analyze the possibilities of developing an universal
waveform generation and porting tools to cover, if possible all three domains: military, public
safety, commercial.
Key points have been identified which led to conclusions, which future research and developments will be necessary.
Chapter 1 is investigating the effects of divergence between SDR architectures in Europe, the
impact of using SWRadio instead of SCA, i.e, future trends in commercial mobile communication and the role of security aspects.
Currently several SDR development projects exist in Europe. The three domains military, public
safety and commercial have been analyzed and compared. The effects of differences, impacts
of reuse between domains, trends and security have been studied..
There are different requirements in the military, public safety and commercial domains. This
leads to different SDR architectures. These different architectures have used different definition
on elements that solve common needs.
Due to the existing divergence of SDR architectures in military, public safety and commercial
domains porting and reuse of models and code between the domains today is not easy.. Currently, porting waveforms between domains is feasible only on specification level.
OMG SWRadio and SCA-Next are two examples of other architectures analyzed in the report
as alternative to SCA. OMG SWRadio is not yet fully mature. OMG SWRadio uses different interface design concept and uses Model Driven Development (MDD), thus a change to OMG
SWRadio will result in considerable extra work to change way of working and legacy redesign
instead of reuse. However, in long run the use of MDD may be a big benefit. SCA Next has the
status of working in progress and will need considerable maturity steps before it is usable.
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One general trend is that Corba protocol will be often replaced by alternative approaches.
NoTA is a new design paradigm in commercial mobile communication. It is an architecture for
device communication. NoTA is supposed to drastically decrease the design cost of radios.
Security is required in all domains. However the focus and requirements are very different. Security has to be considered early in the design process as part of the system architecture. Note
that security has impact on Waveform Design, Development Tools, Portability and Installation.
Chapter 2 is to analyze the status and work of the ETSI Technical Committee "Reconfigurable
Radio Systems" RRS. The analysis of ETSI work concerning the UWGT study is first to provide
from a design flow some perspectives. It unfortunately comes rapidly to an end since no activity
has happened in this technical area within ETSI RRS.
To go deeper in the analysis, it has been extended to the viewpoint of SDR technologies for
Radio Sets implementation. The main conclusion is :

The ETSI RRS architecture has a couple of similar functionalities compared with the
SCA, but is specifically targeting to the commercial mobile area. There are functionalities
in the RRS architecture, which are strongly supporting multiline capability on the platform by providing management entities like the multi-radio controller or the resource
manager on the platform, which do not have counterparts in the SCA. HAL is mentioned,
but not specified.
A set of recommendations has been expressed for future work in order to continue integration of
ETSI and military domain:

Monitoring of the ETSI standardization efforts should be sustained by industry and government stakeholders of SCA-based international SDR standardization,

Specific R&D coupled to pre-standardization activities could be launched to:
a. Marry the driving paradigm of SCA (RPC - Remote Procedure Calls) with the
paradigm once considered within ETSI RRS (SDF - Synchronous Data Flow),
b. Refine specification of the Access Control Services of the MURI interfaces.

Mainstream standardization activities could take place in shorter terms to develop the
potential of WInnF Transceiver Facility in front of ETSI RRS needs for a Reconfigurable
RF Interface (RFFI).
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Chapter 3 is outlining the status quo of waveform development processes in the three domains
military, public safety and commercial and is comparing the identified processes.
The general design process, found in all domains, comprises phases starting from analyzing
and understanding the applicable standards, generating requirements and specifications, computer simulations, creating design specifications and finally, the implementation phase. Apart
from the implementation, the processes are quite independent from the application or on the
implementation platform and thus independent from the domain. The implementation phase
partially is differing among the three domains.
The commercial domain is dominated by the high production quantities and the extreme cost
pressure, which forces especially in the mobile part wide-spread use of application specific integrated circuits (ASIC). However, due to the growing new standards the recent trends are also
going towards programmable multi-standards solutions. Indeed, today in the commercial domain there is no common SW architecture (like SCA) accepted by all telecom industry. In the
military domain there are often user requirements for a common radio architecture (SCA based),
as a “de-facto standard. The public safety domain can be considered somewhat in between
these two poles. Compared with the defense domain the SCA is not used in public safety.
The tools used in the three domains are similar or the same top down approach until the implementation phase is used. These include general UML tools and requirements management
tools. When it comes to SCA development (only in the defense domain) integrated tool chains
are evolving covering several or all steps of the design process. Commercial, public safety and
military domains are quite close in their use of tooling for DSP and FPGA design flows.
Up to today, a significant part of the waveform generation has been done at a fairly low abstraction level more or less in all domains.
MDD principles are used increasingly in the three domains. No significant divergences can be
identified between the flows of the three domains.
Chapter 4 Co-modeling as an development approach.
Co-modeling has been one of the approaches that have created wide interest among the industry and academia to enhance the waveform implementation and to make it more platform independent.
One of the most referred individual activities aiming to develop has been the EUREKA-ITEA
project MARTES (Figure 1) .The aim of MARTES was to define, construct, experiment, validate
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and deploy a new model-based methodology for Real-Time Embedded Systems development.
Since then, MARTES has become a main reference to co-modeling approach.
In addition to co-modeling studies such as MARTES, existing methodologies, tool providers,
technical base, functional perimeter for co-modeling approaches and practical implementations
were studied and reported.
Use cases
Functional
requirements
Performance
requirements
Platform
Independent
Model
Architectural
constraints
HW/SW
IP (COTS)
Platform
Architecture
Model
MDA
mapping
UML
domain
Platform
Specific
Model
SystemC
domain
Code
generation
Figure 1: The MARTES approach
In addition to a review of the relevant activities the maturity of co-modeling tools was analyzed.
As part of the analysis a reference environment developed for safety critical and secure applications was presented. Secondly the utilization of co-modeling approach in parallel was analyzed..
The lack of a clear standardized Co-modeling methodology is apparent in commercial mobile
radio development. As a conclusion it can be stated that the number of co-modeling methodologies in use in the commercial mobile radio domain nearly equals the number of players in the
mentioned domain and they are highly dependent on the application and implementation platform. The main players collaborate in international standardization driving common architectures and methods but when it comes to customer projects or real product development proprietary processes are unfortunately followed.
Although similarities can be found as the common approaches are widely utilized in commercial
mobile radio development, the ultimate idea of a Universal Waveform Generation Tool seems a
rather distant goal from this perspective.
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Chapter 5 condenses all the main conclusions of the whole study. Following the investigation of
the current development environments the chapter 5 proposes the areas that need for investigation and improvement in the current military waveform development flow. The governance best
practices of the overall lifecycle of the projects, the lack of an international common standard
from a platform perspective, the streamlining of the maintenance protocols and the need for
interface mechanisms between different development tools are the main areas that need a
strong support and research from the SDR community.
As mentioned, the deliverable concludes with a tentative proposal of a common environment for
military waveform development. This environment is based in commonly used civilian tools and
methodologies. However, it has not been possible to apply the same environment to all the
stakeholders, the deliverable presents how the information should be exchanged between partners to unify and share waveform developments.
Within the military domain realized radio architectures are determined to a high degree by the
SCA and the associated JTRS APIs (the published ones). However, a significant divergence
exists between the military and the commercial domain in terms of radio architecture..
A universal, highly configurable waveform development tool for use by commercial, public safety
and military oriented companies is not feasible today because of the different radio architectures
in use caused by different technical requirements, security aspects, cost structure and market
size, market competition and continuing maturation of design tools.
A good value however could be achieved to enhance porting of a waveform between two companies within the defense domain by using better model transfer capabilities between vendor
specific modeling tools (this would require common activities of the tool vendors).
The figure below is presenting the MDA-terms, the associated tools and the respective outputs.
An important observation is that most tools are not dedicated to one specific model, but can be
used for various models. For example UML tools can be used for CIM, PIM and also partially for
PSM (e.g. for producing SCA infrastructure code).
Porting can be interpreted as a transfer of model data between two platforms. Concerning the
level (CIM, PIM, PSM) where the model exchange is taking place waveforms are not homogeneous, depending on the similarity of the two target platforms involved. For example if there is
the happy coincidence that a software component is running on similar DSPs on the two platforms code exchange may be possible. Vice versa, if there are completely different structures
on the two target platforms only PIM level may be exchangeable.
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MDA Term
Tool Chain
Output
CIM
Word, UML,
OPNET, Matlab
Specification,
Algorithms
PIM
UML, OPNET,
Matlab/Simulink
Model,
Algorithms
Transfer PIM
UML, OPNET,
Matlab/Simulink
Model, Code
C, C++,
VHDL, XML
Transfer PSM
IDE + compiler
Binary
executable
Transfer Code
PSM
Transfer Spec
Target Close
Platform TCP
Target Platform
TCP
Figure 2: Model- and tool chain
In reality often the transfer of models will happen at PIM level, partially at PSM level, in rare
cases on executable level.
An important conclusion from this is that it is not necessary to have the same tools in the involved organizations. The important thing is the availability of standardized interfaces and standardized model design elements for the transfer of model data.
For tools which are a de-facto industry standard like MATLAB the exchange of model data is not
difficult. For other areas like the UML the situation is different.
Currently the exchange of model information often is also not possible between UML-Tools of
different vendors, even when using the same UML- and XMI-version (XML Metadata Interchange). This is caused by the fact that the information to be exchanged is not specified (e.g. in
a DSL, a domain specific language).
A specification of the full set of modeling elements to be used in a specific domain, such as the
SDR domain, might solve some of the major issues for model interoperability.
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Furthermore also the exchange of diagram information (very important for graphical UML design) is difficult, as the existing standard (UML diagram interchange, UMLDI) is only supported
by few UML tools.
The proposed way ahead is to initiate respective standardization efforts with participation of
significant tool vendors
Overall conclusions
Though the waveform development processes are looking similar in all the domains, an universal, highly configurable waveform development tool is not feasible due to different requirements
and architectures in the domains, complexity, cost, security and continuing tool maturation.
However, porting and exchange of components can be improved significantly compared with
the current approach by transferring waveform models between the tool chains of the two involved organizations. The tool chains need not to be the same, but the same interface mechanisms is required to perform the exchange. The existing mechanisms are not sufficient. To go
further the information to be exchanged has to be specified e.g. by definition of a suitable domain specific language (DSL).
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