Wireless Base Station Design on General Purpose Processor with Multicore Technology

Software radio (SWR) is one of the major goals for future wireless communication engineering. Driven by multicore technology, we can think about implementing wireless base station on multicore general purpose processor (GPP). IBM Cell processor and Intel Clovertown processor represent the state-of-the-art multicore processor of two different main streams, heterogeneous and homogenous multicore architectures. In this paper, using Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) as example, we introduce the design of wireless base station over these two different multicore GPP platforms, with deep analysis of the software designs and workload mapping. Based on it, those key aspects of multicore architecture design, such as multicore, multiple issue, multithreading, and memory structure are thoroughly discussed, together with the performance impact from our experiment results and different program models. From this paper, people can know how to implement the SWR base station on multicore GPP with high performance, how the processor architecture impacts the performance, and what other factors related to system design need to be considered in future.