Joint Uplink and Downlink Performance Profiling of LTE Protocol Processing on a Mobile Platform

This article provides a detailed profiling of the layer 2 (L2) protocol processing for 3G successor Long Term Evolution (LTE). For this purpose, the most processing intensive part of the LTE L2 data plane is executed on top of a virtual ARM based mobile phone platform. The authors measure the execution times as well as the maximum data rates at different system setups. The profiling is done for uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) directions separately as well as in a joint UL and DL scenario. As a result, the authors identify time critical algorithms in the protocol stack and check to what extent state-of-the-art hardware platforms with a single-core processor and traditional hardware acceleration concepts are still applicable for protocol processing in LTE and beyond LTE mobile devices.