MIMO-OFDM LTE system based on a parallel IFFT/FFT on NoC-based FPGA

Abstract

The growing demand for wireless devices capable of performing complex communication processes has imposed an urgent need for high-speed communication systems and advanced network processors. This paper proposes a hardware workflow developed for the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) communication system. It studies the multiple-input, multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) LTE system. Specifically, this work focuses on the implementation of the OFDM block that dominates the execution time in high-speed communication systems. To achieve this goal, we have proposed an NoC-based low-latency OFDM LTE multicore system that leverages Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) parallel computation on a variable number of processing cores. The proposed multicore system is implemented on an FPGA platform using the ProNoC tool, an automated rapid prototyping platform. Our obtained results show that LTE OFDM execution time is drastically reduced by increasing the number of processing cores. Nevertheless, the NoC’s parameters, such as routing algorithm and topology, have a negligible influence on the overall execution time. The implementation results show up to 24% and 76% execution time reduction for a system having 2 and 16 processing cores compared to conventional LTE OFDM implemented in a single-core, respectively. We have found that a 4×4 Mesh NoC with XY deterministic routing connected to 16 processing tiles computing IFFT task is the most efficient configuration for computing LTE OFDM. This configuration is 4.12 times faster than a conventional system running on a single-core processor.