Research And Design Of Middleware For Software-defined Radar

Radar systems are moving towards an open architecture.The characteristics of reconfigurable hardware,reconfigurable software and diversified functions is becoming more obvious.The concept of software-based radar was proposed more frequently.The key technology for software and hardware decoupling is the middleware technology.This technology provides communication and computation abstraction.It can also utilize standardized hardware and flexible software applications,which are the main advantages.Issues during radar system development,including algorithm verification,model development,upgrade and maintenance,can be overcomed and improved with this new concept.Firstly,this thesis analyzed the development procedure of domestic and international software-defined radar technologies,then introduced the architecture of advanced products and the progress of domestic research institutions.Based on existing radar system,features and programming model of heterogeneous processor architectures are elaborated in detail.Open source projects are broadly researched for implementation reference.With experience of radar system design,the concept of middleware and software-defined radar on heterogeneous processing platforms is established.An architecture of software-defined radar is given.The middleware layer,which is composed of communication middleware and computation middleware,provides software and hardware decoupling and functional support for the radar application layer.Based on this architecture,the design requirements are defined by higher layer of middleware,such as core framework,radar signal processing algorithm and system design graphic user interface.After the comparison of several system models,DDS-compatible API,centralized domain manager,distributed data pool,and publish-subscribe pattern are chosen for the communication middleware.The computation middleware adopts POSIX and VSIPL as the standard design method.Some core functions in VSIPL are optimized.In order to evaluate the performance of the middleware,tests including running speed and bandwidth utilization are performed on the Intel processor-based COTS platform.Compared with the nonmiddleware implementation,this middleware implemetation brings little performance overhead.To verify proposed software architecture,a ground-based radar project is ported to this platform.Quick deployment work flow can be achieved with the software-defined radar system design GUI.As a result,a multi-beam multi-mode real-time radar signal processing application is tested based on proposed middleware implementation.According to the performance test of the radar system,the software architecture can meet the functional requirements of real radar system,and the middleware can reach the performance indicators required for radar signal processing.Finally,the remaining issues are summarized,and the software-defined radar will be improved with national standards in the future.