An ASIP design for low loss compression of front-haul data in 5G base stations

Abstract

With the continuous development and commercialization of 4G and 5G technology, the bandwidth demand of front-haul IQ data in CPRI/eCPRI increases rapidly, so data in CPRI/eCPRI links need to be compressed. To solve this problem, this paper built a compression/decompression ASIP (Application Specific Instruction-set Processor) module as a subsystem of our front-haul processor system which could choose algorithms flexibly and data compression ratio with low delay and low distortion. Its advantage is that the three compression algorithms are integrated together, and the compression precision is improved through the study of distortion minimization. Through the performance evaluation, the data transmission rate can reach 537.6 Gbps, and the hardware overhead and EVM value are both satisfied.