Software Terminal development Environment and Lead Application (STELA)

Objectives

The project centres on the creation of a fundamental and wide-ranging Software Defined Radio (SDR) development environment and methodology to address the software portability and reuse issues in developing wireless User Terminals (UTs).

A lead UT application in the satellite communications field will also be developed to help focus and validate the approach, involving the integration of existing Intellectual Property Right (IPR) blocks with newly developed portable blocks that are not currently available in the market-place.

Maximum use of existing architectural and interface standards will be combined with development of bespoke standards wherever necessary to facilitate the commercial development of UTs.

The full development and standardisation of such a framework requires a cross-industry view and approach, which has thus far not made it advantageous enough for UT manufacturers to exploit, due to the competitive pressures to deliver quickly and the effort invested in legacy in-house solutions.

Features

STELA defines a Portability Framework, Toolset and Test Framework around the application as shown.

click for larger image

Project Plan

Phase 1a (current phase) - Requirements and architectural definition of the Software Terminal Development Environment (STDE) and lead UT application, with the central aims of fully specifying and technically de-risking the main development.

Phase 1a has two major reviews:

• Requirements Definition Review,
• Architectural Definition Review.

Phase 2a - Detailed design of the STDE and lead UT application, including software implementation of a Proof of Concept (PoC) in both areas to de-risk the main development schedule. Target platform work will also be progressed to allow a first port of the PoC code to evaluation target hardware to run the planned demonstrations.

• Phase 2a has two major demonstrations.

Challenges

In developing each new wireless UT, a significant percentage of effort is spent solving the same set of real-time embedded development and test problems as peer and forerunning projects, leading to duplication within each manufacturer and across the industry as a whole.

Tight bundling between the application software development environment and the target hardware further limits the potential for portability and reuse between contemporary products and subsequent generations.

Combined with the low productivity associated with traditional debugging techniques, the overall effect is a significant reduction in development efficiency across the industry. In addition, unanticipated effort and surprises arising during integration and test late in the project are major causes of project schedule and cost over-runs.

Benefits

By improving portability, reuse and development productivity, the ultimate benefits of the work will be to facilitate more rapid and cost-effective development of new wireless UTs in the future, and secure improved efficiency levels for the industry as a whole.

Current Status (dated: 12 Apr 2012)

Completed.

The requirements and design have been prepared for proof of concept implementation.