GNU Radio-Based Digital Communications: Computational Analysis of a GMSK Transceiver

Significant progress has been made in the past twenty years on the implementation of software-defined radios (SDRs) based on general purpose processors (GPPs). In contrast, there has been limited work on the analysis of the computational requirements of such SDRs. Quantifying the signal processing complexity in SDR is critical to ensuring that the system has sufficient computational resources to support reliable digital communications. Our contribution is to analyze and measure the computational cost of a Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) transceiver based on GNU Radio, a widely used GPP-based SDR. Further, we introduce GNU Radio's working mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide detailed computational analysis of digital communications based on GNU Radio.