A Gpp-based Software-defined Radio Front-end for Wlan Standards

This paper presents a software-defined radio testbed for the physical layer of wireless LAN standards. All baseband physical layer functions have been successfully mapped on a Pentium 4 processor that performs these functions in real-time. This has been tested in combination with a CMOS integrated wideband analog front-end containing a low noise amplifier, downconversion mixers and filters. The testbed consists of both a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter contains a transmitter PC with a DAC board, an Agilent E4438C generator for upconversion and an antenna. The receiver consists of an antenna, a wideband SDR analog frontend and a receiver PC with an ADC board. On this testbed we have implemented two different types of standards, 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 limitations in our testbed are the maximal channel bandwidth of 20 MHz, the dynamic range of the wideband SDR analog front-end and of course the processing capabilities of the used PC.