MatLab speeds Chinese development time

DOCOMO Beijing Communications Laboratories has adopted MatLab to develop and verify algorithms for the development of new physical layer mobile communications technologies for standards such as LTE-A.

The application has allowed the labs to cut development time by 50% compared with its previous C and C++ development methods and allowed researchers to develop new algorithms for link-level and system-level simulations.

To verify algorithms developed in MatLab, the engineers used a simulation frame that was built on a complete transmit-and-receive chain using Signal Processing Toolbox and Communications System Toolbox.

The team then used Parallel Computing Toolbox to parallelise communications algorithms and scale them without code changes to a 32-core cluster running Distributed Computing Server, reducing the time for the completion of extensive simulations from weeks to hours.

This speed-up has helped to verify more than four times the test cases, parameter settings and operating scenarios than was previously possible.

The labs rely on Monte Carlo simulations that test a range of scenarios and parameter values for dozens of base stations and hundreds of mobile devices.