An efficient FPGA implementation of OFDM physical layer for SDR-based applications

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions are emerging as important modulation technique because of its capacity of ensuring high level robustness against interference. This paper presents a prototype of a high throughput and low complexity OFDM transceiver. OFDM is a modulation technique which is now widely used in various high speed mobile and wireless communication systems such as: fixed Wi-Fi system (IEEE 802.11a standard), mobile Wi-Fi system (IEEE 802.11b standard), fixed WiMAX system (IEEE 802.16a standard), and mobile WiMAX system (IEEE 802.16e standard). In this paper, the design and implementation of OFDM system will be illustrated. Moreover, the design and simulation results for some standards of OFDM using MATLAB will be observed as a practical system examples that uses OFDM as a modulation technique. All the proposed modules are designed using VHDL programming language. The transceiver is implemented on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) through Xilinx System Generator for DSP. The proposed transceiver provides low processing latency. A rapid prototyping platform interfacing MATLAB with Xilinx kit is used in this development. Our experiments show that the proposed transceiver utilizes 68% of the slice LUTs and 55% of slice registers on Virtex-6 FPGA, operating at a maximum frequency of 112 MHz, which proof that our design have the lowest area over the previous related work presented before.