Processor for Measuring Radio Network Design Quality

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and prototyping of an arithmetic processor based on reconfigurable technology, whose purpose is to determine in a parallel manner the quality of the solution in a radio network design optimization problem. This problem consists in the search for an optimal set of locations in which to place radio antennas in order to obtain the maximum possible coverage, for a given terrain and antenna characteristics. The original computational contribution of this work is to use programmable logic devices to avoid the high cost of computing the evolutionary algorithms required to tackle this optimization problem. This is achieved by means of reconfigurable processors working in parallel. On the basis of the results obtained from the prototype, it may be considered a parallel architecture capable of achieving a great acceleration in the calculations.