High performance turbo decoder on CELL BE for WiMAX system

Abstract

Turbo codes are widely used in many radio systems due to its superior performance and Software Radio (SR) is an emerging paradigm of the wireless communication system design due to its good flexibility and adaptability. However, since turbo decoding is computationally intensive, the SR implementation of turbo decoding is always challenging. In this paper, an efficient software implementation of the double-binary turbo decoder for the WiMAX SR baseband system on IBM CELL Broadband Engine (BE) is presented. After the parallelization and optimization of the decoder structure, with a single Synergistic Processor Element (SPE) running at 3.2GHz, the implemented turbo decoder can achieve a throughput up to 1.36 Mbps. With eight SPEs working in parallel, the decoder can obtain the throughput more than 10Mbps, which can meet the WiMAX system requirement at 5MHz bandwidth mode. © 2009 IEEE.