Parallel IFFT/FFT for MIMO-OFDM LTE on NoC-Based FPGA

Abstract

AbstractThe evaluation of wireless communication systems over the last decades has led to a growing demand for more advanced high-speed communication systems. In this paper, we propose a hardware workflow developed for implementing the Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication system. This work studies the Multiple-input, multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) LTE system. The main focus of this work is on implementation of OFDM modulation/demodulation functions as they are the main contributors to the processing time and latency in high speed communication systems. To achieve this goal, a multicore low latency OFDM LTE system is proposed. The multicore RTL code is generated using the ProNoC tool. The main contribution of this system the archived speed up in OFDM LTE computation using parallel processing techniques on an NoC based multicore system. The speed-up comparison for systems having different numbers of cores computing the IFFT task are reported in this paper. The proposed multicore system is also compared with a single-core system as a reference design. Systems having different LTE OFDM configurations are synthesized, implemented and verified using Altera Stratix V GX FPGA. The application execution time and FPGA resource utilization are used as compassion metrics. The proposed multicore LTE OFDM systems having 2 and 16 processing tiles computing IFFT tasks on different LTE channel bandwidths, the execution time is reduced by 24% and 76%, respectively compared to a conventional LTE OFDM system that is running on a single-core system.