Software radio on smartphones: Feasible?

In this work-in-progress paper, we explore the expected impacts, the reality, and the technical issues of making MAC / PHY protocols downloadable softwares (like apps) for smartphones. The notion of software radio on a small number of fixed stations has been investigated for decades, but moving its platform to billions of smartphones and even making it downloadable as an app has never been attempted. We firmly believe that such attempt could open new fronts for the software radio research. Beyond considering its possible impacts and ramifications, we demonstrate through measurements that today's smartphone hardware is already capable enough to support the real-time execution of downloadable MAC/PHY software. It is certainly true for lowspeed technologies such as ZigBee, and is close to providing real-time operation of higher-speed technologies like Wi-Fi. In our study, we also find that different application processor architectures lead to different bottlenecks in the MAC/PHY processing chain. This implies that the design of protocols that might be executed in software on general-purpose platforms should factor in the processor architecture like multiple cores and SIMD instruction sets, as it will facilitate the softwarization of wireless communication protocols in the future.