Skip to main content
  • Research Article
  • Open access
  • Published:

Implementation of Wireless Communications Systems on FPGA-Based Platforms

Abstract

Wireless communications are a very popular application domain. The efficient implementation of their components (access points and mobile terminals/network interface cards) in terms of hardware cost and design time is of great importance. This paper describes the design and implementation of the HIPERLAN/2 WLAN system on a platform including general purpose microprocessors and FPGAs. Detailed implementation results (performance, code size, and FPGA resources utilization) are presented. The main goal of the design case presented is to provide insight into the design aspects of a complex system based on FPGAs. The results prove that an implementation based on microprocessors and FPGAs is adequate for the access point part of the system where the expected volumes are rather small. At the same time, such an implementation serves as a prototyping of an integrated implementation (System-on-Chip), which is necessary for the mobile terminals of a HIPERLAN/2 system. Finally, firmware upgrades were developed allowing the implementation of an outdoor wireless communication system on the same platform.

[1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12]

References

  1. IEEE Std 802.11b : Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications: Higher-Speed Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4 GHz Band. 1999.

  2. IEEE Std 802.11a : Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications: High Speed Physical Layer in the 5 GHz Band. 1999.

  3. ETSI TS 101 457 : Broadband Radio Access Networks (BRAN); HIPERLAN Type 2; Physical (PHY) layer.

  4. Cahners-In-Stat : Life, Liberty and WLANs: Wireless Networking Brings Freedom to the Enterprise. November 2001

  5. ARM Integrator 2005.http://www.arm.com/devtools/integrator

  6. ETSI TS 101 761-1 : Broadband radio access networks (BRAN); HIPERLAN Type 2; Data Link Control (DLC) layer—Part 1: Basic data transport functions. 2000.

  7. ETSI TS 101 761-2 : Broadband Radio Access Networks (BRAN); HIPERLAN Type 2; Data Link Control (DLC) Layer—Part 2: Radio Link Control (RLC) sublayer. V1.3.1, 2002

  8. van Nee R, Prasad R: OFDM for Mobile Multimedia Communications. Artech House, Boston, Mass, USA; 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  9. CoWare 2005.http://www.coware.com/

  10. OCAPI-xl 2005.http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/publications/ds025.pdf

  11. SystemC 2005.http://www.systemc.org/

  12. Xilinx : VirtexTM Data Sheet. 2005.http://www.origin.xilinx.com/xlnx/xweb/xil_publications_index.jsp

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to K Masselos.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Masselos, K., Voros, N. Implementation of Wireless Communications Systems on FPGA-Based Platforms. J Embedded Systems 2007, 012192 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/12192

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/12192

Keywords