A flexible WLAN receiver

Flexible radio receivers are also called Software Defined Radios (SDRs) [1], [2]. The focus of our SDR project [3] is on designing the front end, from antenna to demodulation in bits, of a flexible, multi-standard WLAN receiver. We try to combine an instance of a (G)FSK receiver (Bluetooth) with an OFDM receiver (HiperLAN/2). This paper focusses on the integration of the two receivers. The used modulation techniques (GFSK and OFDM) are very different and result therefore in different receiver structures. As HiperLAN/2 is the most demanding standard, we have used a more advanced receiver algorithm for Bluetooth reception, the MAP (Maximum A posteriori Probability) receiver. Besides the better performance of the MAP receiver, the structure of it is more similar to the HiperLAN/2 receiver. The resulting partitioning of the Bluetooth receiver functions on the HiperLAN/2 receiver parts is very balanced. As other WLAN standards use the same frequency bands and similar modulation techniques, our BluetoothHiperLAN/2 receiver can easily be adapted to these other WLAN standards.