Generators for Wireless Systems Prototyping

Low-latency and high-reliability wireless systems are of increasing interest. There are a number of important emerging use-cases including autonomous vehicles, augmented and virtual reality, and robotics that demand low latency and high reliability. Current wireless systems do not deliver the performance that these applications require. There are many reasons, some of which are being addressed by standardization efforts such as 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), but reliability is only addressed to a limited extent./nThe fundamental problem that must be overcome by ultra-high reliability wireless systems is fading. Relaying is a good way to overcome fading and has been shown to be a promising technique for low-latency high-reliability wireless communication./nRelaying techniques have promising results with analytical models and in simulations, but it is not clear how well these models translate to the real world. The low-latency, high-reliability regime is different from the space occupied by Wi-Fi and LTE, which are more throughput-oriented. To demonstrate the efficacy of these relaying techniques, it is important to build a prototype that demonstrates the system concept and allows performance measurements to be made./nBuilding prototypes of a low-latency, high-reliability wireless system is difficult. For one, it makes using common software-based prototyping techniques difficult because of latency and performance requirements. Custom hardware is necessary for evaluating many of the promising ideas for achieving URLLC. Furthermore, in the process of implementing the system, designers will likely discover new problems and better solutions. Unfortunately, custom hardware is difficult and time-consuming to design and verify. Small conceptual changes to the wireless scheme can result in significant architectural changes to a hardware implementation. Current mainstream hardware design tools and methodologies are ill-suited for tracking these sorts of changes as high-level abstractions, code reuse, and open-source libraries are very limited, especially compared to conceptually similar software tools./nThis work envisions a future where designers use high-level abstractions for custom hardware. We appeal to the way current machine learning frameworks allow productive exploration and fast iteration on network architectures while still affording efficient implementation on a wide range of target platforms. Similarly, future hardware design tools and methodologies should allow domain experts to be productive with high level abstractions that generate efficient and correct hardware. In the context of wireless systems, protocol designers should be able to generate hardware with the same ease they use tools like Matlab or Python for simulation./nWorking towards this vision, this thesis presents a generator-based agile design methodology for wireless systems. Dsptools, a Chisel library for writing reusable signal processing hardware, is an important tool that enables this methodology. Agile design methodologies, generator-based design, and powerful hardware libraries are all important building blocks for realizing this vision.

Advisor: Nikolić, Borivoje