A Performance Evaluation Method Based on Virtualization Architecture

With the iterative upgrading of communication protocols, the complexity of the communication systems is increasing rapidly. In order to satisfy the requirements of implementation complexity, the hardware of the user equipment (UE) has to be upgraded and replaced, resulting in a large amount of electronic wastes. However, the software defined radio (SDR) is designed based on softwares using a general hardware platform. Therefore, only the software upgrade is needed for the communication system if the UE is implemented by SDR. The resource waste can also be reduced greatly. In order to match the computational re-sources of the hardware platform to the computing requirements of the software implementation, a performance evaluation model is studied in this paper. A general scheme is proposed to estimate the computational complexity of the signal processing for the specific communication protocol. Then, the computational ability of the hardware platform can be evaluated compared with the estimated complexity to determine if the hardware can support the specific communication protocol. The numerical results of typical communication systems are also provided to assess the proposed model.