MIMO OFDM Physical Layer Real-Time Prototyping

Emerging wireless communication systems are rapidly moving toward Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technologies to guarantee either robustness and throughput as required by current broadband applications. Targeting a solution easy to integrate, MIMO technology can be conveniently adopted in combination with the largely known Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), a modulation scheme combining high spectral efficiency with low complexity. MIMO and OFDM are the Physical (PHY) layer technologies selected by IEEE to drive the evolution of current Wireless-LAN 802.11 standards. Starting from a template architecture definition, a flexible MIMO W-LAN PHY layer based on IEEE 802.11n draft standard has been implemented and validated on a commercial FPGA-based prototyping platform embedding RF cards to prove on-air real-time capabilities. The overall RTL design has been then synthesized for the STMicroelectronics CMOS low-power 65 nm technology.