Maximizing GPU Exploitation for SDR with GPUDirect

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an ideal platform for telecommunication systems testing and new ideas validation. The high computational resources demand of SDRs has enforced in the past the use of dedicated chips and special purpose hardware, such as digital signal processors (DSPs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The last years Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are excelling in the areas where FPGAs and DSPs used to dominate. Unavoidably, the use of GPUs has been proposed for SDR processing unit, but not in the most efficient way. We propose and implement, using off-the-shelf components, an efficient, direct GPU-to-SDR communication scheme, and we provide insights for more efficient utilization of the GPU processing power.