Energy profiling of FPGA-based PHY-layer building blocks encountered in modern wireless communication systems

Proceeding at: IEEE 8th Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM), took place 2014, Jun, 22-25 in Coruña (españa). The event web site of http://www.gtec.udc.es/sam2014/ .Characterizing the energy cost of different physical (PHY) layer building blocks is becoming increasingly important in modern cellular-based communications, considering the cross sector requirements for performance enhancements and energy savings. This paper presents energy profiling metrics of different PHY-layer FPGA implementations encountered in modern wireless communication systems. The results give an insight of the distribution of the consumed energy in different baseband building blocks or configurations before and after applying power optimizations in the FPGA design and implementation.This work was partially supported by: the Spanish Government under projects TEC2011-29006-C03-01 (GRE3N-PHY), TEC2011-29006-C03-02 (GRE3N-LINKMAC) and TEC2011-29006-C03-03 (GRE3N-SYST); and the European Commission under project NEWCOM# (GA 318306).Publicad

A real-time FPGA-based implementation of a high-performance MIMO-OFDM transceiver featuring a closed-loop communication scheme

In this paper we present the FPGA implementation of a multi-antenna Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter and receiver featuring a closed-loop (CL) communication scheme. The PHY-layer development follows the specifications of the mobile WiMAX standard, whereas the limited MAC functionality is using custom specifications. In the implemented CL scheme, the transmitter applies a Transmit Antenna Selection (TAS) decision based on the instantaneous Channel State Information (CSI), which is calculated at the receiver and fed back to the transmitter. The RTL implementation addresses the challenge of efficiently accommodating two transmission schemes with optimal reuse of FPGA resources. The adaptive subcarrier allocation can be thoroughly evaluated only when prototyped in a real-time platform, such as the one described in this paper. The results verified that the CL system is performing better than its open-loop counterpart.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version