From MIMO-OFDM Algorithms to a Real-Time Wireless Prototype: A Systematic Matlab-to-Hardware Design Flow
- PDF / 740,361 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 600.03 x 792 pts Page_size
- 83 Downloads / 177 Views
From MIMO-OFDM Algorithms to a Real-Time Wireless Prototype: A Systematic Matlab-to-Hardware Design Flow ´ and Andre´ Bourdoux Jan-Willem Weijers, Veerle Derudder, Sven Janssens, Frederik Petre, Wireless Research Group, Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center (IMEC), Kapeldreef 75, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium Received 22 December 2004; Revised 4 April 2005; Accepted 7 April 2005 To assess the performance of forthcoming 4th generation wireless local area networks, the algorithmic functionality is usually modelled using a high-level mathematical software package, for instance, Matlab. In order to validate the modelling assumptions against the real physical world, the high-level functional model needs to be translated into a prototype. A systematic system design methodology proves very valuable, since it avoids, or, at least reduces, numerous design iterations. In this paper, we propose a novel Matlab-to-hardware design flow, which allows to map the algorithmic functionality onto the target prototyping platform in a systematic and reproducible way. The proposed design flow is partly manual and partly tool assisted. It is shown that the proposed design flow allows to use the same testbench throughout the whole design flow and avoids time-consuming and errorprone intermediate translation steps. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Fourth generation high-throughput (HT) wireless local area networks (WLANs), which are currently being standardized in the IEEE 802.11n Working Group [1], aim for higher data rates (well beyond 100 Mbps effective throughput at the medium access control (MAC) service access point (SAP)), larger range, and better quality-of-service (QoS), compared to existing IEEE 802.11a/g type of WLANs. To meet these ambitious targets, it is now widely agreed upon that both the physical (PHY) and the MAC layer of these HTWLANs will capitalize on so-called multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communication technology [2]. On the one hand, MIMO techniques, which deploy multiple antennas at both ends of the wireless link, allow to significantly increase the spectral efficiency (and, hence, the data rate), and to significantly improve the performance (and, hence, the QoS and/or the range), compared to their single-antenna counterparts [3–5]. On the other hand, OFDM modulation enables low-complexity frequency-domain processing over the highly frequency-selective indoor propagation channel [6–8]. Several types of MIMO-OFDM processing can be envisioned, depending on where the processing is performed: transmit (TX-only) processing, receive (RX-only) processing and joint TX-RX processing. In either case, defining, optimizing, and verifying the selected digital signal processing
(DSP) algorithms for the WLAN system under consideration almost always require the modeling and the simulation of the complete system functionality using a mathematical software package like, for instance, Matlab. All aspects like automatic gain control
Data Loading...
