Parallel Digital Predistortion Design on Mobile GPU and Embedded Multicore CPU for Mobile Transmitters

Abstract: Digital predistortion (DPD) is a widely adopted baseband processing technique in current radio transmitters. While DPD can effectively suppress unwanted spurious spectrum emissions stemming from imperfections of analog RF and baseband electronics, it also introduces extra processing complexity and poses challenges on efficient and flexible implementations, especially for mobile cellular transmitters, considering their limited computing power compared to basestations. In this paper, we present high data rate implementations of broadband DPD on modern embedded processors, such as mobile GPU and multicore CPU, by taking advantage of emerging parallel computing techniques for exploiting their computing resources. We further verify the suppression effect of DPD experimentally on real radio hardware platforms. Performance evaluation results of our DPD design demonstrate the high efficacy of modern general purpose mobile processors on accelerating DPD processing for a mobile transmitter.