Bluetooth protocol profiling on the Xilinx Virtex II Pro

Nowadays, there is an increasingly stronger trend to integrate a multitude of functionalities into a single device. Traditionally, this has been achieved by utilizing more powerful general-purpose processors to handle the additional workload. Since then, application-specific processors (acting as co-processors or hardware accelerators) were introduced to offload part of these workloads and to more efficiently perform them (e.g., in terms of speed power consumption). Currently, the trend is progressing towards the inclusion of reconfigurable processors to perform those workloads that do not need to be performed at the same time. In this manner, foremost costly area can be saved and less application-specific processors need to be designed and/or included. In the latter two approaches, application profiling is needed to determine compute-intensive or data-intensive operations to be implemented in specialized hardware. In this paper, we present the profiling results of an implementation of the Bluetooth standard. To our knowledge it is the first time profiling results of the Bluetooth standard are presented. First, we solely focus on the Bluetooth standard and determine the most compute/data-intensive operations/functions. Second, we investigate and consider external functions that are called by the Bluetooth code due to its tight integration within the operating system. Our results show that six Bluetooth functions are the most intensive ones. When including the operating system functions (but excluding the interrupt related functions), the most intensive function is memcpy. Keywords— wireless protocols, Bluetooth protocol, profiling, reconfigurable hardware