A Codesign Prototyping Framework for Wireless LAN Transceivers with Smart Antennas

OFDM Wireless LANs based on the IEEE 802.11 standard are complex systems in themselves. When smart antennas are used in such systems, both the MAC and the PHY layers must be redefined in order to achieve application-specific goals. As a result, the development of such systems can become impressively heavy. A complete development framework is presented here. It makes use of hardware/software codesign in order to implement all required layers to develop a wireless access point. The entire framework is targeted at an FPGA platform, providing full flexibility and processing power for the development of PHY layers.