Abstract
This paper presents a software engineer's perspective for the design and implementation of a software radio (SWR) system. The key technical challenge that we want to address is the architecture design of a software radio system and the QoS control for multimedia processing in this architecture. We propose the component-binding based software radio architecture and the QoS-controllablescheduling mechanism (QSM) in this paper. The component-binding based software radio architecture comprises four parts: the control-flow components, the data-flow components, the reconfigurable binding interface, and the SWR management unit (SMU). The QoS-controllable scheduling mechanism applies imprecise computation techniques for SMU to ensure that time-critical tasks can meet their deadlines and multimedia services can meet their QoS requirements. QSM is coarse-and-fine adjustable. Also, we investigate the k-tasks-look-ahead substitutable check to further enhance the overall schedulability for the on-line scheduler in QSM. By taking advantage of programmability, the proposed system architecture can serve as a flexible platform for supporting the accessing and processing of wireless multimedia services.