Operating System

One very important aspect of a software-radio is it's real-time capability. In our implementation, we transmit and receive slots of a duration of about 1ms. If we want to make sure that there is no blank in the transmission, we need to make sure to do our calculations in this short time-span and to do it at the right moment.

In a modern operation system, lots of things are happening at the same time: graphics, sound, network, disk-access and more. A normal program will have to wait for these tasks to finish, before it can do it's work. This means that it's nearly impossible for a normal program to meet sub-ms precision. Different approaches exist to bring a solution to this problem. We chose RTLinux because of it's stability, availability and because it is licensed under the GPL which means that other people can use this solution without having to pay high software-costs.

In short, RTLinux allows to meet time-constraints of a couple of $\mu s$, the precision-constraint that is given by todays hardware. It does this by running a real-time aware micro-kernel which is principally responsible for scheduling. One of the default tasks that runs with the lowest priority is the linux-kernel. This makes sure that even if the kernel is busy doing one of the not-so important things, RTLinux may put it to sleep, execute the real-time task, and resume the linux-kernel.