Design and Development of a CCSDS 131.2-B Software-Defined Radio Receiver Based on Graphics Processing Unit Accelerators

Abstract

In recent years, the number of Earth Observation missions has been exponentially increasing. Satellites dedicated to these missions usually embark with payloads that produce large amount of data and that need to be transmitted towards ground stations, in time-limited windows. Moreover, the noisy nature of the link between satellites and ground stations makes it hard to achieve reliable communication. To address these problems, a standard for a flexible advanced coding and modulation scheme for high-rate telemetry applications has been defined by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). The defined standard, referred to as CCSDS 131.2-B, makes use of Serially Concatenated Convolutional Codes (SCCC) based on 27 ModCods to optimize transmission quality. A limiting factor in the adoption of this standard is represented by the complexity and the cost of the hardware required for developing high-performance receivers. In the last decade, the performance of software has grown due to the advancement of general-purpose processing hardware, leading to the development of many high-performance software systems even in the telecommunication sector. These are commonly referred to as Software-Defined Radio (SDR), indicating a radio communication system in which components that are usually implemented in hardware, by means of FPGAs or ASICs, are instead implemented in software, offering many advantages such as flexibility, modularity, extensibility, cheaper maintenance, and cost saving. This paper proposes the development of an SDR based on NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for implementing the receiver end of the CCSDS 131.2-B standard. At first, a brief description of the CCSDS 131.2-B standard is given, focusing on the architecture of the transmitter and receiver sides. Then, the receiver architecture is shown, giving an overview of its functional blocks and of the implementation choices made to optimize the processing of the signal, especially for the SCCC Decoder. Finally, the performance of the system is analyzed in terms of data-rate and error correction and compared with other SW systems to highlight the achieved improvements. The presented system has been demonstrated to be a perfect solution for CCSDS 131.2-B-compliant device testing and for its use in science missions, providing a valid low-cost alternative with respect to the state-of-the-art HW receivers.