Modeling Multi-Core Software GNSS Receiver with Real Time SW Receiver

In this paper we present our implementation for thread-based, real time software Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver. We also present our approach to use this receiver to model GNSS software receiver application for a multi-core platform. The GNSS application and multi-core platform are developed within CRISP project. The main purpose of our software GNSS receiver implementation is to model multi-core software by using software threads. Because both hardware and software development are being conducted at the same time we did not have the hardware platform available at the beginning of the project. We decided to use thread programming to avoid delays in the application development and to obtain early measurements of the computational load of the individual processing elements of a GNSS receiver and the communication requirements between each processing element. By using these results we were able to define the requirements for the full signal processing chain of a GNSS receiver in the multi-core platform developed in the project. Besides the fact that our receiver can model the behavior of the software GNSS application in multi-core environment, it is also working as a standalone real time software receiver. This enables fast prototyping of new ideas and algorithms for dividing baseband workload between different processing elements. Also new baseband algorithms can be easily evaluated against existing algorithms in the receiver.