Base stations developed according to the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard require unprecedented processing power. 3GPP LTE enables data rates beyond hundreds of Mbits/s by using advanced technologies, necessitating a highly complex LTE physical layer. The operating power of base stations is a significant cost for operators and is currently optimized using state-of-the-art hardware solutions, such as heterogeneous distributed systems. The traditional system design method of porting algorithms to heterogeneous distributed systems based on test-and-refine methods is a manual, thus time-expensive, task. Physical Layer Multi-Core Prototyping: A Dataflow-Based Approach provides a clear introduction to the 3GPP LTE physical layer and to dataflow-based prototyping and programming. The difficulties in the process of 3GPP LTE physical layer porting are outlined, with particular focus on automation.