An Implementation of LTE MAC-Layer Channel Multiplexing and Scheduling Mechanism Porting Upon an FPGA Embedded System Platform to Support Massive NB-IoT Devices Accesses

In the future, telecommunication must be able to provide ubiquitous and adequate wireless network resources to meet the needs of various applications of mMTC (Massive Machine-Type Communication). Specification of NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things), as such, demands to increase the capacity for a larger number of connections with reasonable performance in operation. To face the development trend and to tackle the technological issues, in the implementation of NB-IoT eNB, it is feasible to utilize an acceleration function of our designed SG-DMA (Scatter-Gather Direct Memory Access) controller implemented in FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) to offload processing effort of multi-channel scheduling and enhance operation performance encapsulating a larger number of TBs in a short period. Accordingly, this paper introduces our porting efforts transferring a pre-implemented MAC-Layer function from a PC-Linux environment to an Intel-Altera FPGA development board.