Mobile GPU accelerated digital predistortion on a software-defined mobile transmitter

We present the design exploration and the performance evaluation of a mobile transmitter digital predistortion (DPD) module on a mobile GPU. Digital predistortion is a widely used technique for suppressing the spurious spectrum emission caused by the imperfection of power amplifier and radio frequency (RF) circuits in a real wireless transmitter. Considering the parallel architecture, numerous computing cores and programmability of GPU, in this work, a DPD design based on augmented parallel Hammerstein structure is implemented on a mobile GPU integrated in an Nvidia Jetson TK1 mobile development board, targeting at a mobile transmitter. The algorithm level and data level parallelism are carefully explored for efficient mapping of the DPD algorithm and full utilization of the mobile GPU resources. We analyze the throughput and timing performance of our implementation and verify the functionality of DPD experimentally on a novel software-defined mobile terminal. The results show that our proposed mobile GPU driven digital predistortion design not only achieves real-time high performance, but also offers programmability and reconfigurability for design upgrading and extension.