Energy-efficient hardware architectures for the packet data convergence protocol in LTE-advanced mobile terminals

In this paper, we present and compare efficient low-power hardware architectures for accelerating the Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) in LTE and LTE-Advanced mobile terminals. Specifically, our work proposes the design of two cores: a crypto engine for the Evolved Packet System Encryption Algorithm (128-EEA2) that is based on the AES cipher and a coprocessor for the Least Significant Bit (LSB) encoding mechanism of the Robust Header Compression (ROHC) algorithm. With respect to the former, first we propose a reference architecture, which reflects a basic implementation of the algorithm, then we identify area and power bottle-necks in the design and finally we introduce and compare several architectures targeting the most power-consuming operations. With respect to the LSB coprocessor, we propose a novel implementation based on a one-hot encoding, thereby reducing hardware's logic switching rate. Architectural hardware analysis is performed using Faraday's 90 nm standard-cell library. The obtained results, when compared against the reference architecture, show that these novel architectures achieve significant improvements, namely, 25% in area and 35% in power consumption for the 128-EEA2 crypto-core, and even more important reductions are seen for the LSB coprocessor, that is, 36% in area and 50% in power consumption.