Hardware Decoding Accelerator of (73, 37, 13) QR Code for Power Line Carrier in UPIoT

The proposal of the ubiquitous power Internet of Things (UPIoT) has increased the demand for communication coverage and data collection of smart grid; the quantity and quality of communication networks are facing greater challenges. This brief applies (73, 37, 13) quadratic residue (QR) codes to power line carrier technology to improve the quality of local data communication in UPIoT. In order to improve the decoding performance of the QR codes, an induction method for the error pattern is proposed, which can divide the originally coupled error pattern into six parts and reuse the same module for decoding. This method greatly reduces the resource requirements, so that (73, 37, 13) QR code can be implemented on FPGA hardware. Notably, the hardware architecture is a modular framework, which can fit into an FPGA with different sizes. As an example (73, 37, 13), QR code is implemented on Intel Arria10 FPGA; the experimental result shows that the maximum decoding frequency of this architecture is 21.7 M Hz, which achieves 4121x speedup compared to CPU. Moreover, the proposed architecture benefits from high flexibility, such as modular design and decoding framework in the form of the pipeline which can be seen as an alternative scheme for decoding long-length QR codes.