Software Communication Architecture - Waveform Distribution with MHAL

Abstract: For a long time radio devices have been constructed in hardware with a fixed functionality. This way of constructing radio devices is starting to change with the concept of Software Defined Radio (SDR) evolving. The SDR concept leads to more flexible and long lasting radio devices. In order to make the radio software more standardized and portable, the U.S. military has defined the Software Communication Architecture (SCA). Internal communication within the SCA is done by CORBA, which limit waveforms to be only distributed over CORBA-capable hardware. The U.S. military has defined the Modem Hardware Abstraction Layer(MHAL) to enable distribution over devices not supporting CORBA. This thesis presents an implementation of MHAL and an underlying transport mechanism based on Ethernet. The implementation is done for the OSSIE package. The implementation is evaluated both in terms of real-time and throughput performance. The results show that MHAL achieves good performance, in comparison to CORBA, and can greatly be used to distribute waveforms over both CORBA and non-CORBA capable devices.