Implementation issues of PC-based software radio systems

PC-based software radio systems can enjoy more flexibility comparing to software radio systems based on DSPs or FPGAs. But a single general-purpose computer nowadays does not have the ability of performing the entire real-time digital signal processing of a conventional wireless communications system. To solve this problem, we designed a parallel computing algorithm to make a group of PCs work cooperatively to accomplish the signal-processing task. Conventional computers lack an I/O system capable of delivering constant data stream to the front-end. Techniques to solve this problem are also discussed in this paper.