Performance Evaluations of Packet Encapsulation Using Scatter-Gather Direct Memory Access to Support Massive Devices Accesses for NB-IoT Small Cell

In the past years, telecommunication provides convenient and adequate wireless network services for people. In the coming future, moreover, telecommunication must meet the requirements of next application paradigm of mMTC (Massive Machine-Type Communication) for ubiquitous networking devices. Among which, NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things) specification demands to increase the capacity for a larger number of devices connections with reasonable performance in operations with B4G/5G-LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology. To face the development trend and to tackle the technological issues, this paper is to propose a hardware and software co-design framework, which can support accelerations to encapsulate or decapsulate MAC (Media Access Control) PDUs (Packet Data Units) using a designed SG-DMA (Scatter-Gather Direct Memory Access) module to offload the processing efforts of processors, and thus enhance the operation performance of the system. Furthermore, the operation overheads of SG-DMA are evaluated carefully to avoid negative performance effects for the system to validate its practice.