A Reconfigurable Outer Modem Platform for Future Communications Systems

Current and future communications systems have to provide a large degree of flexibility e.g. to provide multi-service ability, seamless roaming, softinfrastructure upgrading, user-defined propriety, simultaneous multi-standard operation, and different quality of service. This paper presents a multi-processor platform for the application domain of channel decoding. Inherently parallel decoding tasks can be mapped onto individual processing nodes. The implied challenging inter-processor communication is efficiently handled by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) such that the throughput of each node is not degraded. Each processing node features Viterbi and Log-MAP decoding for support of convolutional and turbo codes of various currently specified mobile and wireless standards. Furthermore, its flexibility allows for adaptation to future systems.