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.