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IEEE 802.11ac MIMO Transceiver Baseband Processing on a VLIW Processor

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Abstract

Wireless standards are evolving rapidly due to the exponential growth in the number of portable devices along with the applications with high data rate requirements. Adaptable software based signal processing implementations for these devices can make the deployment of the constantly evolving standards faster and less expensive. The flagship technology from the IEEE WLAN family, the IEEE 802.11ac, aims at achieving very high throughputs in local area connectivity scenarios. This article presents a software based implementation for the Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO) transmitter and receiver baseband processing conforming to the IEEE 802.11ac standard which can achieve transmission bit rates beyond 1Gbps. This work focuses on the Physical layer frequency domain processing. Various configurations, including 2×2 and 4×4 MIMO are considered for the implementation. To utilize the available data and instruction level parallelism, a DSP core with vector extensions is selected as the implementation platform. Then, the feasibility of the presented software-based solution is assessed by studying the number of clock cycles and power consumption of the different scenarios implemented on this core. Such Software Defined Radio based approaches can potentially offer more flexibility, high energy efficiency, reduced design efforts and thus shorter time-to-market cycles in comparison with the conventional fixed-function hardware methods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES) under the Parallel Acceleration (ParallaX) project, the Graduate School of the Tampere University of Technology, and Nokia Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, 33720, Tampere, Finland

    Mona Aghababaeetafreshi, Lasse K. Lehtonen, Toni Levanen, Mikko Valkama & Jarmo Takala

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  1. Mona Aghababaeetafreshi
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  2. Lasse K. Lehtonen
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  3. Toni Levanen
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  4. Mikko Valkama
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  5. Jarmo Takala
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Correspondence to Mona Aghababaeetafreshi.

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Aghababaeetafreshi, M., Lehtonen, L.K., Levanen, T. et al. IEEE 802.11ac MIMO Transceiver Baseband Processing on a VLIW Processor. J Sign Process Syst 85, 167–182 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-015-1032-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-015-1032-2

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