Ziria: wireless programming for hardware dummies

Software-defined radio (SDR) brings the flexibility of software to the domain of wireless protocol design, promising both an ideal platform for research and innovation and the rapid deployment of new protocols on existing hardware. Most existing SDR platforms require careful hand-tuning of low-level code to be useful in the real world. In this talk I will describe Ziria, an SDR platform that is both easily programmable and performant. Ziria introduces a programming model that builds on ideas from functional programming and that is tailored to wireless physical layer tasks. The model captures the inherent and important distinction between data and control paths in this domain. I will describe the programming model, give an overview of the execution model, compiler optimizations, and current work on parallelization and scheduling reconfigurable pipelines. We have used Ziria to produce an implementation of 802.11a/g and a partial implementation of LTE.

Dimitrios Vytiniotis is a researcher in the Programming Principles and Tools group in Microsoft Research Cambridge. His research work is in the areas of programming languages design and implementation. Dimitrios holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and an ECE degree from NTUA, Athens.