DSP Implementation of Antenna Array Algorithms for OFDM-Based Wireless LAN

Motivated by the theoretical results on multi-antenna signal processing techniques promising substantial performance gains, a feasible reconfigurable hardware architecture for OFDM-based Wireless LANs is presented in this paper. The ultimate objective of the platform is to support single-antenna links, as well as antenna arrays at the receiver and/or at the transmitter, taking into account the limitations caused by a real-time implementation. After a brief overview of the implemented multi-antenna algorithms, we present the hardware platform that has been built based on both fixed point and floating point DSPs from Texas Instruments, together with the evaluation of the complexity associated to the operations, and their scheduling. The performance indicates that a multi-antenna architecture supporting up to four antennas at the receiver side might accomplish the real-time requirements.