Efficient Implementation of Wireless Applications on Multi-core Platforms based on Dynamically Reconfigurable Processors Wei Han, Ying Yi, Mark Muir, Ioannis Nousias, Tughrul Arslan, Ahmet T. Edorgan University of Edinburgh w.han@ed.ac.uk Abstract Wireless internet access technologies such as WiMAX have significant market potential. The high demand for embedded high performance WiMAX solutions is forcing designers to seek multi-core systems which offer competitive advantages in terms of all performance metrics. By providing the flexibility of a DSP with performance and power consumption approaching that of an ASIC, emerging dynamically reconfigurable processors are proving to be stronger candidates than conventional general-purpose processors or DSPs for future multi-core systems. This paper presents several multi-core solutions, based on newly emerging dynamically reconfigurable processor cores targeting WiMAX based applications. Coming with a SystemC trace-driven multi-core simulator, a simulation platform has been proposed in order to explore and implement various multi-core solutions combining different task partitioning strategies and inter-process communication methods. 1. Introduction Since the advent of the internet, people have come to depend on it more and more. There is an increasing desire to access it at any time from anywhere. Obviously, cable based internet cannot satisfy this demand. An early wireless internet protocol IEEE 802.11 was released in 1997 as only 2Mbit/s maximum data rate and 100-meter range [1]. Nowadays, the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard [2], which is commercially called WiMAX, can provide up to 70 Mbps bit rate over many kilometers. This gives WiMAX a significant advantage over other alternatives like Wi-Fi and DSL. The physical layer of WiMAX includes both downlink and uplink data processing, as shown in Figure 1. Many market-leading companies today provide products based on different silicon implementations of WiMAX standards. For example, Wavesat DM256 [3] is an ASIC solution, and the Intel NetStructure WiMAX Baseband Card is based on the Intel IXP2350 network processor [4], Picochip PC203 [5] use the multi-core DSP approach. In [6], a multitasked version of the WiMAX physical layer has been mapped onto a single dynamically reconfigurable (DR) architecture with a real-time operating system (RTOS) – μC/OS – II. Ever since the first effort to design a parallel machine (called SOLOMON) failed in 1958 [7], the parallel computing paradigm has been improved dramatically. Driven by the trends from application, semiconductor technology, and microprocessor and system design [8], parallel architectures are applied to smaller and smaller computer systems, from the original mainframes, to servers, and to PCs, and now even to embedded systems. Now there is a need to employ multi-core solutions to complex embedded applications such as WiMAX, which demand high performance, strict low power, and in-field reprogrammability to follow the evolving standard. Due to the shorter distances the signals between processors have to travel, multi-core gains the advantage over multi-chip SMP in terms of all performance metrics. In embedded fields, besides Picochip multi-core DSPs mentioned above, other multi-core products include Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, intellaSys SEAforth-24A, and Ambric Am2000 family. Few multi-core projects are based on coarse-grained DR processors: One such example being the work on developing a multi-core based on Figure 1. WiMAX physical layer processing chain International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems 0-7695-3109-1/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CISIS.2008.61 837 International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems 0-7695-3109-1/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CISIS.2008.61 837 International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems 0-7695-3109-1/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CISIS.2008.61 837