Future wireless communication systems require efficient and flexible baseband
receivers. Meaningful efficiency metrics are key for design space exploration
to quantify the algorithmic and the implementation complexity of a receiver.
Most of the current established efficiency metrics are based on counting
operations, thus neglecting important issues like data and storage complexity.
In this paper we introduce suitable energy and area efficiency metrics which
resolve the afore-mentioned disadvantages. These are decoded information bit
per energy and throughput per area unit. Efficiency metrics are assessed by
various implementations of turbo decoders, LDPC decoders and convolutional
decoders. New exploration methodologies are presented, which permit an
appropriate benchmarking of implementation efficiency, communications
performance, and flexibility trade-offs. These exploration methodologies are
based on efficiency trajectories rather than a single snapshot metric as done
in state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication
