Richard Taylor (UCI) Eric Dashofy (UCI) Haig F. Krikorian (Boeing) Michael J. Marich (Boeing) - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Joint Research: UCI ISR-Boeing Anaheim EngineeringSoftware Architecture-Based Development of Product Lines for the Software-Defined Radio Domain

Richard Taylor (UCI)

Eric Dashofy (UCI)

Haig F. Krikorian (Boeing)

Michael J. Marich (Boeing)

• Overview
• What is this joint research project all about?
• Who is doing it?
• Why are we doing it?
• Software Defined Radio Background
• Experience
• What are we doing?
• What are our goals/plans for the future?
• Lessons Learned

• What is UCI’s role in this project?
• Development/maturation of an architecture description language (ADL) and environment to capture product line variants
• What is Boeing’s role in this project?
• To determine if an ADL and its environment adds value to the development of a Software Defined Radio (SDR) architecture and its variants

• UCI Team:
• Richard Taylor – Principal Investigator
• Research Associates (led by Eric Dashofy)
• Boeing Team:
• Peter Heckman – Project Manager
• Haig F. Krikorian – Associate Technical Fellow
• Michael J. Marich – Software Systems Engineer

• ADLs funded by DARPA (circa 1996) attracted attention as a way to capture and show consistency across software systems
• ADL advances included the ability to enforce h/w and s/w cross-component typing
• Recent ADL advances attracted attention as a way to define, develop, and generate product lines architectures and variants

• Software Defined Radio is a collection of hardware and software technologies that enable reconfigurable system architectures for wireless networks and user terminals.
• SDR provides an efficient and comparatively inexpensive solution to the problem of building multi-band, multifunctional wireless devices that can be adapted, updated, or enhanced by using software upgrades.
• Radios built using SDR concepts can allow standard, open, and flexible architectures for a wide range of communications products.
• The information provided on this page is taken from the open source, public domain: http://www.sdrforum.org/sitemap.html

• Software Defined Radios are radio devices that can be software-configured to perform many different tasks (“waveforms”), e.g.:
• Video over VHF (Television)
• Audio over FM (In-your-car radio)
• VoIP over Wideband Network Waveform
• SDR is a system-of-systems with many levels, each of which contains different kinds of variation
• Architecture can provide value at each of these levels

• Dynamic, varying configurations of vehicles and personnel carrying SDRs

• Varying unit-level hardware configurations
• Multi-unit, 4 boards-per-unit, redundant, large form factor
• Single unit, 2 boards, small form factor

SBC / 1 Channel

SBC / 1 Channel

SBC / 1 Channel

SBC / 1 Channel

Backplane

Unit-level Hardware Configuration

Crypto

• Varying board-level hardware configurations
• Number of processors, speed/capability of each, red-side/black-side
• Other resources: RAM, cache, etc.

SBC / 1 Channel

BlackSide

GPP

FPGA

DSP

RedSide

GPP

AudioControl

Black Side GPP

• Varying software configurations
• Waveforms define set of components and capabilities
• With many potential deployments depending on board/hardware config
• Many waveforms deployed on unit/hardware configs
• Logical connections over physical connections

Proc1

Proc2

Crypto

Crypto Alg 1

Red Side GPP

PacketProc

AudioProc

VideoProc

METACProc

SDRDeploymentDescriptor

XMLs

xADL 2.0ArchitectureDescriptions

Translator

xADL 2.0

DataBindingLibrary

• Translate deployment descriptors to xADL 2.0
• Extend translated models with new data using additional xADL 2.0 schemas
• Apply xADL 2.0 tools to translated descriptors

• 2003: Developed a teaming relationship between UCI and Boeing
• 2004: Applied UCI ArchStudio* and xADL to the Open Source SCARI** SDR Architecture
• Identified architecture holes & inconsistencies
• Captured complex hierarchical dependencies
• Plans to generate initial product line variants
• www.isr.uci.edu/projects/archstudio/

** Software Communications Architecture Reference Implementation: http://www.crc.ca/scari/

• Partnership Lessons
• Pushed research partner from software architecture to system architecture
• Research partner responsiveness to questions and comments
• Industry partner exposed to product family architecture capture and variant generation
• Product Lessons
• Leap to new technology (cost/benefit analysis)
• Integrating technology with current process/procedures and tool sets
• Product engineering (migration from research tool to industry use)

• Domain
• SCARI model maturity prior to public release
• “build me a consistent product variant”
• “build me a broken product” (ad hoc, adaptable architecture)
• Better (different) way to express deployment views (software and hardware configurations)

• ArchStudio refinement:
• Usability, learn-ability, productivity
• Better depict product line variants
• xADL refinement:
• Capture heterogeneous architecture/styles
• Architecture definition process development:
• Augments the current UML tools to include an ADL for architecture capture and refinement

• ArchStudio / xADL refinements to:
• Capture the multi-dimensional hardware and software relationships in dynamic, ad-hoc system architectures and their variants
• Improve the representation of system deployment views of hierarchical assembly architectures
• Track other (e.g., π-ADL) progress:
• Identify potential xADL advancements
• Identify architecture definition process improvements