An FPGA-based physical layer implementation for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication

This paper presents the design and implementation results for IEEE 802.11p Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment Physical layer using Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware. IEEE 802.11p defines modifications of IEEE 802.11a to support Intelligent Transportation Systems applications such as supporting public safety and licensed private operations over communication channels. Towards this objective our implementation goes through two phases. Firstly, a highlevel design tool was used for the Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding chain. Xilinx System Generator is a system-level modeling tool that runs under MatLab Simulink and facilitates FPGA hardware design. Secondly, the use of Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) was required for the design of the OFDM system. Finally the transmitter and the receiver were implemented into two identical FPGA boards provided by Nallatech using RF evaluation boards from Analog Devices in order to configure our system in 5.9 GHz.