Heterogeneous multi-core architecture for a 4G communication in high-speed railway

The fast development of high-speed railway (HSR), as a high-mobility intelligent transportation system (ITS), and the growing demand of broadband services for HSR users, introduce new challenges to wireless communication systems. 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard has been widely used to satisfy the HSR communication system needs. The key part of 4G LTE standard is the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. In order to achieve a reliable communication and meet the demands of high performance processing and low energy consumption of HSR, we propose a flexible heterogeneous multi-core architecture for embedded LTE MIMO-OFDM system using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). In this paper, different multi-core configurations of the LTE MIMO-OFDM are explored and their performances are evaluated on the Xilinx Zynq FPGA platform. The consumed area, power, and execution times of the different configurations are analyzed and compared in order to propose the most efficient architecture for this application.