Virtual Radio Engine

Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware platforms use parallel architectures. Current concepts of developing applications (such as WLAN) for these platforms are complex, because developers describe an application with hardware-specifics that are relevant to parallelism such as mapping and scheduling. To reduce this complexity, we have developed a new programming approach for SDR applications, called Virtual Radio Engine (VRE). VRE defines a language for describing applications, and a tool chain that consists of a compiler kernel and other tools (such as a code generator) to generate executables. The thesis presents this concept, as well as describes the language and the compiler kernel that have been developed by the author. The language is hardware-independent, i.e., developers describe tasks and dependencies between them. The compiler kernel performs automatic parallelization, i.e., it is capable of transforming a hardware-independent program into a hardware-specific program by solving hardware-specifics, in particular mapping, scheduling and synchronizations. Thus, VRE simplifies programming tasks as developers do not solve hardware-specifics manually.

A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents

Cooperative behaviour of agents within highly dynamic and nondeterministic domains is an active field of research. In particular establishing highly responsive teamwork, where agents are able to react on dynamic changes in the environment while facing unreliable communication and sensory noise, is an open problem. Moreover, modelling such responsive, cooperative behaviour is difficult. In this work, we specify a novel model for cooperative behaviour geared towards highly dynamic domains. In our approach, agents estimate each other’s decision and correct these estimations once they receive contradictory information. We aim at a comprehensive approach for agent teamwork featuring intuitive modelling capabilities for multi-agent activities, abstractions over activities and agents, and a clear operational semantic for the new model. This work encompasses a complete specification of the new language, ALICA.