Performance optimization and parallelization of turbo decoding for software-defined radio

This paper describes the optimization, parallelization, and simulated execution performance of a software double-binary turbo decoder implementation supporting the WiMAX standard suitable for software-defined radio (SDR). Turbo codes offer excellent error-correcting performance, but they introduce significant computational demands in a communication system. In order to enhance execution performance for SDR, software for a turbo decoder based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm was first adapted from the open-source Coded Modulation Library. Optimization and parallelization of the adapted software were then pursued and assessed with a multiprocessor version of the SimpleScalar simulator. Simulation results show that serial optimizations of the original adapted stand-alone C decoder software improve performance by more than 200%. The use of special instructions to accelerate important functions provides a further benefit of nearly 40% relative to the new baseline for performance. Exploiting the parallelism available in the MAP algorithm then yields a speedup of 10.8 on 12 processors. Simulation also shows that cache effects do not have a significant impact on parallel execution times.