LOLA SDR: Low power low latency software defined radio for broadcast audio applications

—This brief proposes a new low power, low latency and low cost reconﬁgurable architecture for software deﬁned radio. Due to their ﬂexibility and reconﬁgurability, software deﬁned radios are now massively used as wideband transceivers, channel sounders or network gateways. However, they often struggle to meet the desired requirements in terms of energy consumption and throughput. In this brief, we present a new architecture capable of tackling these challenges, by combining an off-the-shelf generic radio component with a low power microcontroller associated to a Fourier transform coprocessor. To prove the beneﬁt of our approach, after describing the key assets of the architecture, we derive a complete physical layer dedicated to audio broadcast applications. This chain is capable of streaming High Deﬁnition audio stream in real time with low power (437mW) and very low latency (854 µ s). We show that our processing chain can be ﬂawlessly run on our architecture paving the way for larger adoption of a new generation of low power low latency software deﬁned radio architectures.