Implementation and Benchmarking of Hardware Accelerators for Ciphering in LTE Terminals

Abstract--In this paper we investigate hardware implementations of ciphering algorithms, SNOW 3G and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), for the acceleration of the protocol stack layer 2 in the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE). This analysis is based on timing requirements from execution time measurements in a simulated mobile phone platform, where we apply data rates of 100 Mbit/s and above (200 and 300 Mbit/s) to account for LTE and beyond LTE investigations. Different architectures for both algorithms are explored in order to meet the performance requirements, while keeping the power and area budget at a reasonable level. Therefore, a hardware analysis is done using a standard cell library of Faraday's 90 nm CMOS technology. Finally, the cryptographic substitution box with one-hot encoding emerges as the best solution for both ciphering schemes. Additionally, the 128-bit data path in the AES is identified as the most suitable architecture for LTE terminals, whereas a dual-AES ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Sebastian Hessel, David Szczesny, Nils Lohmann, Attila Bilgic, Josef Hausner
• Keywords: Communications, Data Rates, GLOBECOM 2009, LTE Investigations, LTE Terminals