WiBench: An open source kernel suite for benchmarking wireless systems

Abstract

The rapid growth in the number of mobile devices and the higher data rate requirements of mobile subscribers have made wireless signal processing a key driving application of mobile computing technology. To design better mobile platforms and the supporting wireless infrastructure, it is very important for computer architects and system designers to understand and characterize the performance of existing and upcoming wireless protocols. In this paper, we present a newly developed open-source benchmark suite called WiBench. It consists of a wide range of signal processing kernels used in many mainstream standards such as 802.11, WCDMA and LTE. The kernels include FFT/IFFT, MIMO, channel estimation, channel coding, constellation mapping, etc. Each kernel is a self-contained configurable block which can be tuned to meet the different system requirements. Several standard channel models have also been included to study system performance, such as the bit error rate. The suite also contains an LTE uplink system as a representative example of a wireless system that can be built using these kernels. WiBench is provided in C++ to make it easier for computer architects to profile and analyze the system. We characterize the performance of WiBench to illustrate how it can be used to guide hardware system design. Architectural analyses on each individual kernel and on the entire LTE uplink are performed, indicating the hotspots, available parallelism, and runtime performance. Finally, a MATLAB version is also included for debugging purposes.