Architecting an LTE base station with graphics processing units

Due to the rapid growth of mobile communication, wireless base stations are becoming a significant consumer of computational resources. Historically, base stations have been built from ASICs, DSP processors, or FPGAs. This paper studies the feasibility of building wireless base stations from commercial graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are attractive because they are widely used massively parallel devices that can be programmed in a high level language. Base station workloads are highly parallel, making GPUs a potential candidate for a cost effective programmable solution. In this work, we develop parallel implementations of key kernels to evaluate the merits of using GPUs as the baseband signal processor. We show that the digital processing subsystem for a 75 Mbps LTE base station can be built using two NVIDIA GTX 680 GPUs with power consumption of 188 W.