Software-defined radio (SDR) brings the flexibility of software to the domain of wireless protocol design, promising both an ideal platform for research and innovation and the rapid deployment of new protocols on existing hardware.

To be useful in the real world, the physical (PHY) layer of wireless radio protocols must achieve high-throughput while maintaining low latency in resource constrained environments. As a result, most SDR platforms require careful hand-tuning of low-level code. Ziria demonstrates that a domain-specific high-level language can allow writing high-level code that compiles efficiently in this space. The Kyllini Ziria Compiler (kzc) achieves this efficiency by elaborating the imperative surface language into a purely functional intermediate representation (IR) and exploiting domain specific optimization passes on this IR.

We will walk through the compilation pipeline in a CPU implementation for simple Ziria programs, showing how kzc is capable of wringing performance from high-level code. Although these simple Ziria programs are toy examples, the techniques covered here scale up to real world implementations including fully standards compliant 802.11ag, LTE, and LTE-U pipelines.