An energy-efficient hardware accelerator for Robust Header Compression in LTE-Advanced terminals

In this paper we present an efficient hardware architecture for accelerating the Robust Header Compression version 2 (ROHCv2) algorithm in Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile devices. The proposed hardware accelerator and its software variant are evaluated on an FPGA-based SoC. Our results show that the advised hardware architecture provides processing speeds (2.9 Gbit/s) beyond LTE-Advanced. Moreover, it increases the compression speed by 14-fold and reduces power consumption by 37%, compared to the software solution. The hardware is further optimized to handle multiple packet flows by employing a shared context buffer, thereby lowering the energy consumption of the ROHC hardware by 21% and ceasing degradation in compression rate.