Refine
Document Type
- Doctoral thesis (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Language
- English (2)
Keywords
- Vorwärtsfehlerkorrektur (2) (remove)
Institute
- FG Systeme (2)
Wireless communication has become an indispensable part of our life and the demand for achieving higher throughput with lower energy consumption is ever growing. The ambitious throughput of 100 Gb/s and beyond is now becoming a modest goal thanks to comprehensive advances in transmission technologies and protocols. One important aspect of these advances is with regard to channel coding methods and the ability to detect and correct errors at the receiver. Computations needed by such methods become generally more complicated as they become more powerful in their performance. This imposes a great challenge for researchers attempting to devise practical methods for encoding and decoding Forward-error Correction (FEC) techniques tailored for high-throughput scenarios.
In this work we focus on high-throughput Quasi-Cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) codes, as they have been selected as one of the main FEC techniques for the two major next generation wireless technologies, namely Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) and 5G. Our target is to develop complete encoding and decoding design for these codes in order to reach the throughput of 100 Gb/s with affordable power consumption. Toward this goal, we investigate first the appropriate encoder design for these codes which can be used at such high data-rate with reasonably low power consumption. Then we propose several novel ideas for improving the decoding performance and complexity of QC-LDPC codes. The proposed novel ideas collectively facilitate a decoder able to run at 50 Gb/s with less than 12 pJ/b energy consumption for a Latin squares QC-LDPC code. All the proposed methods are practical and implementable and their effectiveness are showcased by either Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) or Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) synthesis.
The design of 100 Gbps wireless networks is a challenging task. A serial Reed-Solomon decoder at the targeted data rate has to operate at ultra-fast clock frequency of 12.5 GHz to fulfill timing constraints of the transmission. Receiving a single Ethernet frame on the physical layer may be faster than accessing DDR3 memory. Moreover, data link layer of wireless systems has to cope with high bit error rate (BER). The BER in wireless communication can be several orders of magnitude higher than in wired systems. For example, the IEEE 802.3ba standard for 100 Gbps Ethernet limits the BER to 1e-12 at the data link layer. On the contrary, the BER of high-speed wireless RF-frontend working in the Terahertz band might be higher than 1e-3. Performing forward error correction on the state of the art FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) and ASICs requires a highly parallelized approach. Thus, new processing concepts have to be developed for fast wireless communication. Due to the mentioned factors, the data link layer for the wireless 100G communication has to be considered as new research, and cannot be adopted from other systems.
This work provides a detailed case study about 100 Gbps data link layer design with the main focus on communication reliability improvements for ultra-high-speed wireless communication. Firstly, constraints of available hardware platforms are identified (memory capacity, memory access time, and logic area). Later, simulation of popular techniques used for data link layer optimizations are presented (frame fragmentation, frames aggregation, forward error correction, acknowledge frame compression, hybrid automatic repeat request, link adaptation, selective fragment retransmission). After that, data link layer FPGA accelerator processing ~116 Gbps of user data is presented. At the end, ASIC synthesis is considered and detailed statistics of consumed energy per bit are introduced. The research includes link adaptation techniques, which optimize goodput and consumed energy according to the channel BER. To the author’s best knowledge, it is the first published data link layer implementation dedicated for 100 Gbps wireless communication shown anywhere in the world.