Embedded real-time applications in communication systems have significant timing constraints, thus requiring multiple computation units. Manually exploring the potential parallelism of an application deployed on multi-core architectures is greatly time-consuming. This paper presents an open source Eclipse-based framework which aims to facilitate the exploration and development processes in this context. The framework includes a generic graph editor (Graphiti), a graph transformation library (SDF4J) and an automatic mapper/scheduler tool with simulation and code generation capabilities (PREESM). The input of the framework is composed of a scenario description and two graphs, one graph describes an algorithm and the second graph describes an architecture. The rapid prototyping results of a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) algorithm on a multi-core digital signal processor illustrate both the features and the capabilities of this framework.