Characterization of Baseband Implementations Using Energy Efficiency Metric Based Quantification

Abstract

Energy consumption is an issue in general in information and communication technologies (ICT), but also cellular communications in particular. Base station sites are the main energy consumers in a mobile network. Their energy consumption significantly contributes to green house gas (Co2) emissions. It has been found that digital baseband is the main contributor to dynamic part of the power consumption in new base station deployments due to its explosive computational complexity. Hence, the implementations of baseband subsystem need to be energy efficient in advanced systems and thus to reduce Co2 foot print and save on energy costs. In this paper, we have presented an approach for evaluating energy efficiency metrics for any signal processing algorithm on TI's DSP and Xilinx FPGA. This evaluation of energy metrics is very much required to characterize the implementations and for quantifying the gains achieved from any energy efficient strategy. In addition, we showed that reducing execution cycles taken by signal processing algorithm effectively reduces its dynamic power consumption. As an example, FFT/IFFT algorithm, one of the critical block in OFDMA systems is considered for energy analysis.