Efficient pipelined multistream AES CCMP architecture for wireless LAN

Abstract

Widespread WLAN has used Advance Encryption Standard in Counter with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol (AES CCMP) as security services. As the next-generation WLAN adopts multiuser MIMO technology, multiple AES blocks are needed because this technology supports multiple packet transmission in parallel. To minimize the cost increase due to multiple AES blocks, we propose a pipelined AES architecture which processes multiple packets in parallel. By using a pipelined AES architecture instead of multiple AES blocks, efficiency is improved greatly since this pipelined architecture enables to sharing of the AES core. To find the optimum number of stages, we implemented pipelined architectures with various numbers of stages. The results show that a 3-stage pipeline is most efficient, and we achieve 4.34 Gpbs throughput with 2.39 Mbps/slice implementation cost of 1,817 slices and 0 BRAM using Xilinx Virtex 5. This efficiency results from the pipelined architecture's high operating frequency and resource sharing.