Dynamically reconfigurable LTE-compliant OFDM modulator for downlink transmission

As the number of wireless devices, services, communication standards and respective modes of operation rapidly grows, the design of reconfigurable digital baseband processing systems for radio devices becomes more important and challenging. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is among the most relevant wireless systems in 4G communications and its waveform is OFDM-based. According to the LTE mode of operation, OFDM parameters may change and influence baseband processing operations. This paper presents a dynamically reconfigurable LTE-compliant OFDM modulator for Downlink transmission able to adapt its internal hardware organization on-demand according to the digital modulation scheme and OFDM parameters, such as number of data subcarriers, IFFT size, Cyclic Prefix and window length. System reconfiguration is performed by employing FPGA-based Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) techniques. The worst-case DPR latencies measured are 895 μs and 1.192 ms for digital modulation and channel bandwidth adaptation, respectively. These results show that the adopted design approach is feasible in wireless baseband processing systems. Power estimations suggest that circuit specialization at run-time can potentially improve system power efficiency.