Generic Design Framework for an Efficient Wireless MAC Data Path

Recent years have seen a phenomenal growth in demand for residential broadband. With the advent of small form-factor high performance integrated SoCs (see, for example, the TI) and short area broadband wireless technologies (WiFi and the upcoming WiMAX/LTE), the broadband access point or Base Station Router (BSR) is becoming a mass-market item. Coupled with the ongoing interest in 'femto-cells', it is likely that over the next five years, residential “access point” base-stations will to a significant percentage of the communication requirements. The cBSR can be defined as a base station which has limited capabilities it terms of user data throughput, number of subscribers and is typically based on off-the-shelf hardware. It is more suitable for small scale deployments like wall mount or SOHO networks. There are varied differences between the multiple wireless technologies that currently exist or are developing in terms of protocol procedures, radio resource management the frequencies they operate and the underlying radio access technologies they use. However, all of them are focused on one primary goal of providing high speed broadband access to users, using standardized, low-cost hardware platforms and off-the-shelf software. In all of these products, the engineering challenge is to marry packet processing capabilities of standard desktop class operating systems, to the special requirements of the SoC servicing the wireless interface. If the data path of MAC for all these technologies is analyzed, they have many functions that are in common and the design concepts to implement these functions can be used across any wireless technology like WiMAX or LTE or even older WiFI.Consequently, if we consider the BSR as a generic product (with specialized interfaces for wireless access), then the common core functions can be formulated into a design framework which is suitable multiple wireless technologies. In the rest of this document, we discuss the generic framework of the BSR, with special reference to the high-speed data-path and discuss architecture for realization of the same. CONTENTS