Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a upcoming telecommunication standard with throughput of up to 300 Mbps. Due to this it has been chosen as reference point, for analysing the possibilities of hardware accelerating the functionalities of the physical layer in a high performance communication system.
The analysed functionalities are the; CRC, Turbo Encoding, OFDM together with possible channel equalizer options such as ZF,MMSE and Turbo equalization.
Regarding implementation it is concluded that the USRP2 should be used as platform since this offers a variety of front-ends and an already existing FPGA image which handles the initial RF data processing such as down-sampling and filtering.
By analysing the functionalities performance on a CPU and FPGA, it is found that, especially, OFDM and the Turbo decoder will gain from hardware acceleration.
The initial focus of hardware implementation is OFDM since this can be done with transparent modules, which can easily be reused by others. Furthermore, the basic operation of OFDM, the FFT, is exhaustively researched and it does not require further communication between Host-PC and USRP than the already existing. To interface the block processing of the FFT and the continuous datastream of the FPGA, a pipeline module is designed which gathers symbols into packets.