State-of-the-art mobile communication depends on complex signal processing – digital techniques to generate and analyse wireless signals – to transmit large amounts of communications data in an energy-efficient way. In mobile devices and base-stations (the masts and equipment that support the mobile network), signal processing must be sped up using specialist processors, a technique known as hardware acceleration. This enables the signal processing to keep pace with the amount of data coming through.
Conventionally, this hardware acceleration is designed separately from the signal processing algorithms. However, achieving the required processing throughput can result in poor signal processing energy efficiency.