A Partial-Reconfiguration-Enabled HW/SW Co-Design Benchmark for LTE Applications

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Rapid and continuous evolution in telecommunication standards and applications has increased the demand for a platform with high parallelization capability, high flexibility, and low power consumption. FPGAs are known platforms that can provide all these requirements. However, the evaluation of approaches, architectures, and scheduling policies in this era requires a suitable and open-source benchmark suite that runs on FPGA. This paper harnesses high-level synthesis tools to implement high-performance, resource-efficient, and easy-maintenance kernels for FPGAs. We provide various implementations of each kernel of PHY-Bench and WiBench, which are the most well-known benchmark suites for telecommunication applications on FPGAs. We analyze the execution time and power consumption of different kernels on ARM processors and FPGA. We have made all sources and documentation public for the benefit of the research community. The codes are flexible, and all kernels can easily be regenerated for different sizes. The results show that the FPGA can increase the speed by up to 19.4 times. Furthermore, we show that the power consumption of the FPGA can be reduced by up to 45% by partially reconfiguring a kernel that fits the size of the input data instead of using a large kernel that supports all inputs. We also show that partial reconfiguration can improve the execution time for processing a sub-frame in the uplink application by 33% compared to an FPGA-based approach without partial reconfiguration.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number978
JournalElectronics (Switzerland)
Volume11
Issue number7
Publication statusPublished - 22 Mar 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

unpaywall 10.3390/electronics11070978

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Keywords

  • 5G, Benchmark, Partial reconfiguration

Library keywords