Abstract
We present our contribution to the general-purpose-processor-(GPP)-based radio. We describe a baseband software-defined radio testbed for the physical layer of wireless LAN standards. All physical layer functions have been successfully mapped on a Pentium 4 processor that performs these functions in real time. The testbed consists of a transmitter PC with a DAC board and a receiver PC with an ADC board. In our project, we have implemented two different types of standards on this testbed, a continuous-phase-modulation-based standard, Bluetooth, and an OFDM-based standard, HiperLAN/2. However, our testbed can easily be extended to other standards, because the only limitation in our testbed is the maximal channel bandwidth of 20 MHz and of course the processing capabilities of the used PC. The transmitter functions require at most 714 M cycles per second and the receiver functions need 1225 M cycles per second on a Pentium 4 processor. In addition, baseband experiments have been carried out successfully.
Highlights
New wireless communications standards do not replace old ones; instead the number of standards keeps on increasing and an abundance of standards already exists; see Table 1
The transmitter PC continuously generates HiperLAN/2 or Bluetooth medium access control (MAC) bursts which are sent in real time to the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) board at 20 MSPS by using an Adlink cPCI-7300 digital I/O PCI card
The source code of the Bluetooth and HiperLAN/2 transmitter and receiver is written in C and compiled with the Intel compiler 7.1 under Linux, using floating-point precision because floating-point operations are as fast as fixed-point operations on a Pentium 4 processor
Summary
New wireless communications standards do not replace old ones; instead the number of standards keeps on increasing and an abundance of standards already exists; see Table 1. In an ideal software radio, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) are positioned directly after the antenna. Such an implementation is not feasible due to the power that this device would consume and other physical limitations [2, 3]. It is a challenge to design a system that preserves most of the properties of the ideal software radio while being realizable with current-day technology Such a system is called a software-defined radio (SDR). Software-defined radio has both advantages for consumers and manufactures because current products support only a fixed number of standards. Manufacturers can upgrade or improve functionality of consumerowned products and SDR could result in shorter development time, cheaper production due to higher volumes
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