Low-power channel coding via dynamic reconfiguration

Presented in this paper are energy-optimum reconfiguration strategies for channel codecs. These strategies are derived by solving an optimization problem, which has energy consumption as the objective function and a constraint on the bit error-rate (BER). Energy consumption models for a reconfigurable Reed-Solomon (RS) codec are derived via gate-level simulation of the finite field arithmetic modules. These energy models along with the BER expressions are then employed to derive the energy-optimum reconfiguration strategies. The energy savings are computed by comparing the energy consumption of the reconfigurable codec with that of the static codec. The energy savings range from 0%-83% for channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) variations from 7 dB-10 dB. On an average 55% energy savings are achieved.