research-article

Ziria: A DSL for Wireless Systems Programming

Authors:

Dimitrios Vytiniotis,

Cristina Luengo AgulloAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, Volume 43, Issue 1

Pages 415 - 428

https://doi.org/10.1145/2786763.2694368

Published: 14 March 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

Software-defined radio (SDR) brings the flexibility of software to wireless protocol design, promising an ideal platform for innovation and rapid protocol deployment. However, implementing modern wireless protocols on existing SDR platforms often requires careful hand-tuning of low-level code, which can undermine the advantages of software. Ziria is a new domain-specific language (DSL) that offers programming abstractions suitable for wireless physical (PHY) layer tasks while emphasizing the pipeline reconfiguration aspects of PHY programming. The Ziria compiler implements a rich set of specialized optimizations, such as lookup table generation and pipeline fusion. We also offer a novel -- due to pipeline reconfiguration -- algorithm to optimize the data widths of computations in Ziria pipelines. We demonstrate the programming flexibility of Ziria and the performance of the generated code through a detailed evaluation of a line-rate Ziria WiFi 802.11a/g implementation that is on par and in many cases outperforms a hand-tuned state-of-the-art C++ implementation on commodity CPUs.

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Lobo PJuarez EPescador FSanz C(2021)Efficient Open Source Software Radio on Heterogeneous Multicore Embedded PlatformsIEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine10.1109/MCE.2020.301017910:2(27-36)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MCE.2020.3010179
Kobayashi TKiselyov OKeller GWang M(2024)Complete Stream Fusion for Software-Defined RadioProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/3635800.3636962(57-69)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635800.3636962
Cunningham GChenji HJuedes DKaranth AKim T(2024)d-GUARD: Thwarting Denial-of-Service Attacks via Hardware Monitoring of Information Flow Using Language Semantics in Embedded SystemsProceedings of the 29th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.1109/ASP-DAC58780.2024.10473945(939-944)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2024
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Index Terms

Ziria: A DSL for Wireless Systems Programming
1. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Context specific languages
      1. Specialized application languages

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Ziria: A DSL for Wireless Systems Programming
ASPLOS '15: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

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Ziria: A DSL for Wireless Systems Programming
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Reviews

Reviewer: Debraj De

Software-defined radio (SDR) facilitates innovation in various wireless protocol designs and deployments. In SDR, a lot of conventional radio hardware components are replaced by efficient software components such as modulators-demodulators, mixers, filters, and many other signal processing capabilities. In existing works and platforms for SDR programming, the low-level codes require manual optimizations that affect the ease and flexibility of programming. In this situation, this work proposes Ziria, a new high-level programming language for SDR. As claimed, this work is probably the first to design a high-level programming language for SDR that can concisely capture and optimize for reconfigurations of pipelines in the physical (PHY) layer. Ziria is designed with domain-specific abstractions. This is suitable for wireless protocols programming in SDR with reconfigurable pipelines and an efficient compilation scheme. The compilation supports limited coarse-grained pipeline parallelism and generates efficient executables for use on commodity central processing units (CPUs). Ziria implements a novel algorithm for vectorization that optimizes the data widths of components in processing pipelines in the PHY layer. This has been shown to provide a combined 10 to 100 times speedup over baseline, amplifying the effects of other optimizations. In the main body of this paper, first the description of programming in Ziria explains stream programming abstractions, which can compose two types of computations together: stream transformers (with input and output streams) and stream computers (with input and output streams, and also additional control value return). Then, the compositions of control path and data path are described. This description is followed by a Wi-Fi receiver pipeline example and a detailed description of Ziria pipeline execution. Second, the vectorization transformation is described in detail, which is the main optimization in the Ziria compiler. The designed decentralized vectorization algorithm identifies sets of feasible vectorizations for transformers and computers in a top-down fashion, and then composes feasible vectorization candidates together in a bottom-up fashion. Finally, some other type- and semantics-preserving optimizations by Ziria are also described. This involves static scheduling optimizations and lookup table generation. Ziria has been demonstrated with an implementation of the rate-compliant PHY layer for Wi-Fi 802.11a/g. Ziria framework performance is evaluated on various digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms belonging to standard Wi-Fi transceivers. It also often showed to outperform hand-tuned C++ implementations on commodity CPUs of existing works in SDR. Overall, this is a great work of very high quality for the SDR platform and language. Relevant readers are highly encouraged to read this work. The compiler, test suite, and Wi-Fi implementations of this work are also publicly available in the GitHub repository (reference [1] in paper). Online Computing Reviews Service

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 43, Issue 1

ASPLOS'15

March 2015

676 pages

ISSN:0163-5964

DOI:10.1145/2786763

Editor:
Doug DeGroot
acm dot org

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS '15: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
March 2015
720 pages
ISBN:9781450328357
DOI:10.1145/2694344
General Chairs:
Ozcan Ozturk
Bilkent University, Turkey
,
Kemal Ebcioglu
Global Supercomputing, USA
,
Program Chair:
Sandhya Dwarkadas
University of Rochester, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 14 March 2015

Published in SIGARCH Volume 43, Issue 1

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https://doi.org/10.1109/MCE.2020.3010179
Kobayashi TKiselyov OKeller GWang M(2024)Complete Stream Fusion for Software-Defined RadioProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/3635800.3636962(57-69)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635800.3636962
Cunningham GChenji HJuedes DKaranth AKim T(2024)d-GUARD: Thwarting Denial-of-Service Attacks via Hardware Monitoring of Information Flow Using Language Semantics in Embedded SystemsProceedings of the 29th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.1109/ASP-DAC58780.2024.10473945(939-944)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASP-DAC58780.2024.10473945
Cunningham GChenji HJuedes DStewart GKaranth A(2023)DAGGER: Exploiting Language Semantics for Program Security in Embedded Systems2023 24th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)10.1109/ISQED57927.2023.10129334(1-7)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
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Woodruff JArmengol-Estapé JAinsworth SO'Boyle MJhala RDillig I(2022)Bind the gap: compiling real software to hardware FFT acceleratorsProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523439(687-702)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
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Shahmohammadian MMainland G(2019)Synthesizing Efficient Hardware from High-Level Functional Hardware Description Languages2019 26th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS)10.1109/ICECS46596.2019.8964954(634-637)Online publication date: Nov-2019
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Melkonian OCharalambidis ASalvaneschi GDe Meuter WEugster PZiarek LSant’Anna F(2018)RHEA: a reactive, heterogeneous, extensible, and abstract framework for dataflow programmingProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Reactive and Event-Based Languages and Systems10.1145/3281278.3281279(11-20)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2018
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Wu HWang TYuan ZPeng CLi ZTan ZDing BLi XLi YLiu JLu SVan der Merwe KGreenstein BSrinivasan K(2017)The Tick Programmable Low-Latency SDR SystemProceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3117811.3117834(101-113)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2017
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