Accelerating the 3GPP LTE System Level Simulation with NVidia CUDA

With the rapid progress of standardization of 3GPP’s LTE (Long Term Evolution) and LTE-Advanced, many research attentions have been focused on the link level evaluations of the 3GPP LTE systems, so as to demonstrate the rationality of novel transmission techniques. Different from theoretical studies, incorporating novel transmission techniques in to the LTE communication systems may affect many parts of the systems, such as signaling process, reference signal design, feedback link design, and compatibility, etc. Link level studies might be too simple to evaluate the benefits of these novel techniques to the entire system. On the other hand, system level simulation concentrates on the performance of the entire network with tens of cells and hundreds to thousands of users. It is possible to illustrate the actual performance of a LTE system by simulations designed from a system standpoint. Since the simulated system is quite large, one can understand the speed of simulation is very important for system level simulation platform. In this paper, we propose a design of Matlab-based 3GPP LTE system level simulator, which makes use of parallel computing techniques supported by NVidia GeForce GTX 260 graphic card. Our simulation experience shows that the simulation time reduces by nearly 1/3 after employing parallel computing techniques.