Partitioning and Assignment Exploration for Multiple Modes of IEEE 802.11n Modem on Heterogeneous MPSoC Platforms

With the advent of heterogeneous MPSoC platform architecture based implementations for the IEEE 802.11n PHY processing, system partitioning and assignment (P&A) have become a key challenge. In this paper we have analyzed the area and energy trade-offs across different P&A schemes for the 4×4 and the 2×2 MIMO 40MHz modes of 802.11n. We have considered the payload processing part of the inner-modem processing for 802.11n PHY. We also present a framework for systematically carrying out the P&A exploration. We show that by exploiting parallelism at different levels, the energy can be reduced with negligible area overheads, by about 40% and 15% for the 4×4 and 2×2 modes, respectively. We also show that the P&A schemes with fine-grained partitioning are more energy efficient for mapping both the modes together on the same platform.