Enabling Protocol Coexistence: High-Level Hardware-Software Co-design of Flexible Modern Wireless Tr

The recent increase in the number of wireless devices has been accompanied by an explosion in the number of protocols for wireless communications, each focusing on different purposes such as execution time reduction, energy reduction, handling higher congestion levels, or operation at different bandwidths. Software-defined radios have introduced new platforms for dynamically modifying wireless system designs, and heterogeneous computing has opened up implementation of such designs on different computing elements. Up to now, researchers have focused on designing complete protocol-specific processing chains. In contrast, our goal is to develop a modeling environment that captures reusability of various processing blocks at the physical layer for several modern protocols, and makes decisions regarding whether processing blocks should be part of reconfigurable hardware or embedded processor software. In this paper, we introduce an integrated profiling approach to implement the 802.11a standard on the Xilinx Zynq system-on-chip. Our approach creates several different MathWorks Simulink model variants for both the transmitter and the receiver, each with a different boundary between hardware and software components. We use these models to generate a bitstream for the FPGA and executable code for the ARM processor. Using this modeling environment, we investigate the HW/SW divide point and identify specific processing blocks to focus on improving. Our results collect such metrics as data path delay, resource utilization, and power usage to demonstrate how exploring variants to processing blocks can further enhance the design.

About the speaker: Ben is full-time Ph.D. student, the campus-wide MathWorks TA, and a graduate research assistant in the implementation of MATLAB-based Cognitive Radio frameworks, co-advised by Prof. Kaushik Chowdhury and Prof. Miriam Leeser. For 5 years, Ben worked for MathWorks, creators of MATLAB and Simulink. There, as a Signal Processing Content Specialist, he wrote technical documentation and examples for DSP & Communications area products such as LTE System Toolbox. Earlier, as a Training Engineer, he traveled across the country to present material on the usage and capabilities of various MathWorks computer software products. For 4 years before that, he worked for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems as a Systems Engineer, mainly on the forward-based X-Band transportable RADAR as part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System program