SPC09-3: Hardware-Accelerated Simulation Tool for End-to-End Communication Systems

We present a hardware/software co-simulation tool for computation-intensive, end-to-end communication systems. The tool uses commercial field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), together with a high-level programming language, to accelerate the total simulation run time. This paper not only describes the design and implementation aspects of the tool, but also presents the laboratory demonstration of the system. Based on the test results, we compare the real-time throughput performance of FPGA-based co-simulation with that of conventional software-only simulation.