NTUA-ECE MicroLab received the Best Paper Award in the International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation
We are pleased to announce that the paper entitled “Optimizing QAM Demodulation with NEON SIMD and Algorithmic Approximation Techniques” received the Best Paper Award in the 24th International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation that was held on June 29-July 4, 2024 in Samos, Greece.
The award-winning paper was co-authored by Ilias Papalamprou (National Technical University of Athens), Georgios Armeniakos (National Technical University of Athens), Dr. Ioannis Stratakos (National Technical University of Athens), Prof. George Lentaris (University of West Attica) and Prof. Dimitrios Soudris (National Technical University of Athens).
Short Abstract: In any telecommunication system, it is crucial to have a high-performance receiver to meet the desired requirements. However with the newer protocols demanding high order constellations, the demodulation process in the receiver becomes a bottleneck. To facilitate the implementation of telecommunication systems on embedded platforms, in this work we explore optimizations to the QAM demodulation, by applying SIMD operations with the NEON engine along with algorithmic approximation techniques. We implement a NEON-based Demodulator using the Approximate LLR algorithm, while we also propose an approximate method for QAM16/QAM64 that focuses on one quadrature for calculating the required Euclidean distances, along with the respective NEON accelerator. We perform a trade-off analysis between system’s BER and execution time of the Demodulator and the receiver module for the base and approximate implementations, while also exploring the impact of different bit widths and precision in computations. We demonstrate that our approximate technique can achieve ×18–×37 speedup over the original algorithm without BER deviations on uncoded channels, while the use of LDPC is also examined.