Complexity of a software GSM base station

There is increasing interest in developing radio-based applications in soft ware. The new architecture for implementing mobile telephony base stations has the potential of offering many benefits: great cost savings by using on e transceiver per BTS instead of one per channel, tremendous flexibility by moving system-specific parameters to the digital part, and allowing the su pport of a wide range of modulation and coding schemes. A very important pr oblem in designing software radio applications is the need to estimate the required complexity of processing to dimension systems. For example, with a software GSM BTS it is critical to estimate the number of channels that ca n be supported by a given processor configuration, and to predict the impac t of future processor enhancements on its capacity. This article is a short version of one which appeared in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Com munications Special Issue on Software Radios [1]. It focuses on the design of a software implementation of a GSM BTS and proposes a platform-independe nt evaluation of its computational requirements based on SPEC benchmarks [2 ].