Hardware acceleration of the robust header compression (RoHC) algorithm

Abstract

This Page is Intentionally Left Blank PrefaceThis Masters thesis summarizes our research work carried out at Ericsson AB, Linkoping, in close collaboration with Product Development Unit LTE. The main contributions for this thesis are:• Hardwaware-Software Codesign of RoHC by Harshavardhan Kittur.• Full Hardware Design of RoHC by Mohammed Al-Obaidi. AcknowledgementsThis thesis was made available and financially supported by Ericsson AB in Linköping. We are grateful to Stefan Backlund, who gave us the opportunity to do this thesis, and provided us with all the needful to make our work in Ericsson AB smooth and pleasant.The writing of this thesis was one of the most significant challenge in our academic life. Without the support, guidance, and patience of the following people it would not have been done at this quality. Our deepest gratitude to all the people who helped us throughout this thesis.• Our two supervisors, Håkan Anderson in Ericsson AB-Linköping and Professor ViktorÖwall in Lund university, who helped us to hurdle all the obstacles during this thesis. We appreciate their time and patience in correcting the writing of this report. We are so happy for getting the chance to work with them in this project and we will never forget their sincere concern and patience.• Bo Eriksson and Niclas Hallqwist in Ericsson AB-Linköping, who attended our weekly supervision meetings, provided us with their advices, and were always confident of our work.• John Fong and Adrian Turcanu from Ericsson AB-Ottawa, who helped us getting familiar with the RoHC algorithm, and patiently answered our questions.• Göran Westerlund and Adam Ashby from Altera, who provided us with the FPGA board.• Orges Balla and Johan Karlsson, whose feedbacks on the report were highly appreciated.• Last but not the least, many thanks to our families and friends for their support, inspiration, and love. AbstractWith the proliferation of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, many cellular carriers are embracing the emerging field of mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The robust header compression (RoHC) framework was introduced as a part of the LTE Layer 2 stack to compress the large headers of the VoIP packets before transmitted over LTE IP-based architectures. The headers, which are encapsulated Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP)/User Datagram Protocol (UDP)/Internet Protocol (IP) stack, are large compared to the small payload. This header-compression scheme is especially useful for efficient utilization of the radio bandwidth and network resources.In an LTE base-station implementation, RoHC is a processing-intensive algorithm that may be the bottleneck of the system, and thus, may be the limiting factor when it comes to number of users served. In this thesis, a hardware-software and a full-hardware solution are proposed, targeting LTE base-stations to accelerate this computationally intensive algorithm and enhance the throughput and the capacity of the system. The results of both solutions are discussed and compared with respect to design metri...