Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] A question on gnuradio capacity of handling real time data streaming and signal processing with USRP N210 + gnuradio on host linux computer

[Marcus D. Leech]

Dear Group,

 

I have a need to do real time or near real time tracking (most likely phase-lock loop) of multiple narrow-band carriers/tones in a 1MHz band of signal input using USRP N210 and gnuradio running on a reasonable linux host. Say the carriers/tones are embedded in the band from -500 kHz to +500 kHz. If I want to lock on to 20 carriers in that band using gnuradio PLLs, will this choke up the computer? If there is a problem, I also would like to think how to reduce data rates. But I don’t know whether multiple LO’s are an option.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

LD

The best thing to do is to put together a simulation, and see if your computer is up to the task or not.

Something that we don't have a really good handle on in Gnu Radio is some  estimates for the computational complexity of
  individual blocks in a flow graph.

If we did, one could do some simple arithmetic:

add up all the complexities of all the blocks on your "fast path" (by this I mean blocks that must necessarily operate at the input sample rate)
multiply that by the sample rate

That gives you an idea of the numbers of MFLOPS/GFLOPS required to support your application.

-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org