AES303 - Ground Station SDRs in the Cloud

Nov 27, 2023 1 min read

Software Defined Radios

Components conventially implemented in hardware, now in software, including things like modems.

demodulation
decoding
frame and packet processing
reporting and analytics

SDRs require hardware acceleration because signal processing is embarassingly parallel, e.g. FGPAs, GPUs, or specialized instruction sets. EC2 accelerated instances are available for this.

FPGAs for SDR

After an ADC converts an analog signal to digital, the signal needs to be processed (highly parallelizable):

Enter FPGAs
Custom programmable
Highly parallelized compute
High bus bandwidth

…transitioned to a demo. This stuff is a bit over my head and out of my wheelhouse.