UHD-DPDK Performance Analysis for Advanced Software Radio Communications

Abstract: Research conducted in LTE and 5G wireless communications systems uses common off-the-shelf hardware components and commercial software defined radio (SDR) hardware. One of the more popular SDR platforms is the Ettus USRP product line which uses the UHD driver and transport protocol framework. System performance can be increased using kernel bypass frameworks along with UHD. This paper investigates UHD with DPDK in an SDR environment using srslTE as the SDR application. We present measurement results using the iperf3 network performance application that show performance improvements when employing a kernel bypass framework to facilitate data transfer over the network interface between the SDR application and the radio hardware.