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Efficient co-design partitioning of WLANs on SoC-based SDRs

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Abstract

Software-defined radio (SDR) is a programmable transceiver with the capability of operating various wireless communication protocols without the need to change or update the hardware. Progress in the SDR field has led to the escalation of protocol development and a wide spectrum of applications, with a greater emphasis on programmability, flexibility, portability, and energy efficiency in cellular, WiFi, and M2M communication. SDR designers intend to simplify the realization of communication protocols while enabling researchers to experiment with prototypes on deployed networks. In this paper, we discuss the HW/SW co-design approach for SDR platforms in the context of wireless communication protocols. We offer a partitioning method of heterogeneous SDR architectures and then discuss the use of Xilinx SDSoC tool for accurate and effective system profiling. To demonstrate our method, we use IEEE 802.11a wireless standard to implement on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 System-on-Chip (SoC). We are able to achieve a significant speedup of 8.7 \(\times\), compared to a software-only implementation. We also achieved a factor of 1.07 \(\times\) improvement in terms of power consumption, compared to a hardware-only implementation. Optimization techniques are also adopted for further speedups, and their effectiveness enable us to achieve a speedup of 1.08 \(\times\), compared to a hardware-only implementation.

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Notes

  1. Xilinx and Intel offer different types of SoCs. They differ in terms of specifications and number of DSP slices, BRAMs, and logic cells. More differences include data width and power consumption.

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Acknowledgements

The authors of this paper would like to express their special gratitude to Xilinx Inc. for providing the necessary hardware and software tools to conduct experimentation for successfully completing this research work.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, 95053, USA

    Rami Akeela

  2. Jimzu Technologies, Saratoga, CA, 95070, USA

    Yacoub Elziq

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  1. Rami Akeela
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Correspondence to Rami Akeela.

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Akeela, R., Elziq, Y. Efficient co-design partitioning of WLANs on SoC-based SDRs. Microsyst Technol 26, 1141–1158 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-019-04641-7

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