Domain-specific Hybrid Mapping for Energy-efficient Baseband Processing in Wireless Networks

Advancing telecommunication standards continuously push for larger bandwidths, lower latencies, and faster data rates. The receiver baseband unit not only has to deal with a huge number of users expecting connectivity but also with a high workload heterogeneity. As a consequence of the required flexibility, baseband processing has seen a trend towards software implementations in cloud Radio Access Networks (cRANs). The flexibility gained from software implementation comes at the price of impoverished energy efficiency. This paper addresses the trade-off between flexibility and efficiency by proposing a domain-specific hybrid mapping algorithm. Hybrid mapping is an established approach from the model-based design of embedded systems that allows us to retain flexibility while targeting heterogeneous hardware. Depending on the current workload, the runtime system selects the most energy-efficient mapping configuration without violating timing constraints. We leverage the structure of baseband processing, and refine the scheduling methodology, to enable efficient mapping of 100s of tasks at the millisecond granularity, improving upon state-of-the-art hybrid approaches. We validate our approach on an Odroid XU4 and virtual platforms with application-specific accelerators on an open-source prototype. On different LTE workloads, our hybrid approach shows significant improvements both at design time and at runtime. At design-time, mappings of similar quality to those obtained by state-of-the-art methods are generated around four orders of magnitude faster. At runtime, multi-application schedules are computed 37.7% faster than the state-of-the-art without compromising on the quality.