Energy characterization of Reed-Solomon decoding in 3G broadcasting

Abstract

3GPP2 has recently introduced the Broadcast and Multicast Services (BCMCS) architecture for cdma2000 1xEV-DO wireless networks to enable service providers to broadcast multimedia content such as MPEG-4 video. For MAC-layer forward error correction the BCMCS scheme uses the Reed-Solomon (RS) decoding process, which consumes a considerable amount of energy on mobile phones. To address this problem, we first characterize the energy consumption of the decoder with respect to its components: the data decoder, error locator and erasure decoder. Based on this detailed energy characterization we propose an analytic energy model which takes account of different levels of bit error rate in the forward traffic channel. This model is then verified experimentally on an ARM microprocessor-based testbed. Our results will help design energy-efficient BCMCS systems for 3G cellular networks.