A comparison of DSP, ASIC, and RISC DSP based implementations of multiple access in LTE

Energy consumption is an issue in general in information and communication technologies (ICT), but also cellular communications in particular. Therefore there is a need for assessing the hardware implementation methods used for cellular from energy consumption perspective. OFDM is a bandwidth efficient multiple access method. It is being used by all forms of future wireless mobilela communication systems including Long Term Evolution (LTE). The RF frontend, baseband algorithms and the protocols of these systems including 4G cellular need implementations with low power consumption, adequate processing speed, and low cost. In view of its importance and computational complexity, in this paper, three forms of implementing the baseband communication systems, including DSP, ASIC and RISC DSP based solutions are considered for the study of OFDM based multiple access methods of LTE through FFT algorithm.