On the design of an FPGA-based OFDM modulator for IEEE 802.11a

The actual and next communication schemes tend to use OFDM systems in order to provide high baud rates and less inter symbol interference. Some examples are 802.11, 802.16, MC-CDMA, digital video broadcasting, wireless USB or wireless firewire among others. Trying to provide a solution to the new devices emerging, slow standard adoption, poor spectrum use, etc. Joe Mitola introduced the concept of "software defined radio", which involves exhaustive configurable digital signal processing like FFT, therefore FPGAs could support many of its operations. This work presents a FPGA design, validation and implementation of an "orthogonal frequency division multiplexing" (OFDM) modulator for IEEE 802.11a using a high level design tool, also reports the resources requirements for the presented system.

[1]  Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols,et al.  OFDM: Back to the Wireless Future , 2002, Computer.

[2]  J. Mitola,et al.  Software radios: Survey, critical evaluation and future directions , 1992, IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine.

[3]  S. Chuprun,et al.  Broadband OFDM using 16-bit precision on a SDR platform , 2001, 2001 MILCOM Proceedings Communications for Network-Centric Operations: Creating the Information Force (Cat. No.01CH37277).

[4]  Chris Dick,et al.  FPGA implementation of an OFDM PHY , 2003, The Thrity-Seventh Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems & Computers, 2003.

[5]  Ramjee Prasad,et al.  OFDM for Wireless Multimedia Communications , 1999 .

[6]  Myung Hoon Sunwoo,et al.  Implementation of application-specific DSP for OFDM systems , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37512).

[7]  Youyun Xu,et al.  Efficient algorithms of FFT butterfly for OFDM systems , 2004, Proceedings of the IEEE 6th Circuits and Systems Symposium on Emerging Technologies: Frontiers of Mobile and Wireless Communication (IEEE Cat. No.04EX710).

[8]  M.J. Canet,et al.  Design of a digital front-end transmitter for OFDM-WLAN systems using FPGA , 2004, First International Symposium on Control, Communications and Signal Processing, 2004..

[9]  Hyeong Ho Lee,et al.  MAC implementation for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN , 2001, Joint 4th IEEE International Conference on ATM(ICATM'01) and High Speed Intelligent Internet Symposium. ICATM 2001 (Cat. No.00EX486).

[10]  Kevin Wong,et al.  Rapid prototyping of 802.11 wireless modems , 2004, SPIE Micro + Nano Materials, Devices, and Applications.