High-Level Design Space and Flexibility Exploration for Adaptive, Energy-Efficient WCDMA Channel Estimation Architectures

Zoltán Endre Rákossy, Zheng Wang, Anupam Chattopadhyay
2012 International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing  
Due to the fast changing wireless communication standards coupled with strict performance constraints, the demand for flexible yet high-performance architectures is increasing. To tackle the flexibility requirement, software-defined radio (SDR) is emerging as an obvious solution, where the underlying hardware implementation is tuned via software layers to the varied standards depending on power-performance and quality requirements leading to adaptable, cognitive radio. In this paper, we conduct
more » ... a case study for representatives of two complexity classes of WCDMA channel estimation algorithms and explore the effect of flexibility on energy efficiency using different implementation options. Furthermore, we propose new design guidelines for both highly specialized architectures and highly flexible architectures using high-level synthesis, to enable the required performance and flexibility to support multiple applications. Our experiments with various design points show that the resulting architectures meet the performance constraints of WCDMA and a wide range of options are offered for tuning such architectures depending on power/performance/area constraints of SDR.
doi:10.1155/2012/961950 fatcat:hyxgv237zrddrm6g43fgq2oebi