International Conference on Computing and Control Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 12 & 13 April, 2012

FPGA Design and Synthesis of Reconfigurable OFDM Transceivers for SDR

S. Prabu and Dr.E. Logashanmugam
AbstractThis paper presents a software-defined radio (SDR) system with reconfigurable architecture for wireless communications. The baseband software implementation by using a low-power fixedpoint digital signal processor (DSP) is applied to demonstrate the concept of SDRs for different standards, and different operational modes.For simplicity, two operational modes, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) of OFDM baseband transceivers are implemented. The interoperability and adaptability among these operational modes of this OFDM System is discussed. Both modes employ radix-2 decimation-intime fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithms. The architecture presented is synthesised using a hardware description language (verilog HDL) code. The outcome of the design is a portable, scalable, quickly adaptable and reconfigurable system which supplies a high quality signal. KeywordsSoftware-Defined Radio, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, FFT, IFFT, Verilog HDL I. INTRODUCTION implementation with hardware description language such as verilog HDL. Rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II provides basic idea about Architecture of Software Defined Radio. Section III provides the idea of interoperability and adaptability of Software Defined Radio. Section IV provides the details about the proposed Reconfigurable OFDM models. Section V provides experimental results. Section VI provides the application with image data and section VII concludes the work. II. ARCHITECTURE OF SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO A. Reconfigurable Architecture Fig. 1 depicts a SDR transmitter and receiver with a Reconfigurable architecture. At the transmitter, all baseband Operations are software-based processing modules as depicted in Fig. 1(a). The DSP software performs source encoding, channel coding, and data stream multiplexing and modulation as needed. Different modulation requirements are implemented with different software modules, including preamble sequences and hand-shaking protocols for transmitting. Similarly, at the receiver, all reversed baseband operations, such as demultiplexing, de-modulation, channel decoding, source decoding are performed by software-based processing units as depicted in the Fig. 1(b). Note that receiver software modules also perform the signal detection and synchronization operations in the beginning stage in order to determine the required operational modes and standards of the incoming waveforms as part of the receiving tasks. B. Flexibility, Upgrade, and Backward Compatibility The flexibility of DSP-based solutions in the SDR systems is due to the programmability. It provides many benefits. For example, algorithms can continually be updated and improved as computational methods advance. For standards-based modules, such as IEEE 802.11, a programmable implementation allows modules to remain compliant as the standards upgraded. A software upgrade is usually all that is needed while the backward compatibility still promised in the Existing Module. Transmitter:

OW a days, digital processors (DSPs) based on reconfigurable logic devices (FPGAs and CPLDs) are taking relevance in the digital communications world. The software defined radio was created to obtain both permanent communications inside different bands of the radio and microwave spectrum with a single device and adaptability as opposed to new innovations of components and equipment. Basically, one is to transfer to software many of the functions that have been taking place in hardware[1]. As semiconductor devices are shrinking, the rate of new Services introduced will soon exceed the rate of miniaturization in electronic packaging. What is needed is a flexible, universal radio platform for receive and transmit, which can be programmed to steer to any band, tune to a channel of any bandwidth, and receive any modulationall within reasonable physical constraints, including size, weight, power consumption, and more important, cost. B.Kelly proposed Software Defined Radio for OFDM protocols in 2009[3]. A more research had been taken place and still new methodologies and techniques have been coming in the area of SDR-OFDM.H.G.Yeh and V.R.Ramirez demonstrated M-ary PSK and QAM OFDM System in a TMS320VC5416 DigitalSignal Processor[4] and FFT[5][6].This paper proposes a novel concept on reconfigurable OFDM transceiver
S. Prabu, Research Scholar, St.peters University, Chennai, India. E-Mail: prabu_vsp@yahoo.co.in Dr.E. Logashanmugam, Research Scholar, Satyabama University, E-Mail: logu999@gmail.com

Fig. 1(a): Software reconfigurable transmitter block

ISBN 978-1-4675-2248-9 2012 Published by Coimbatore Institute of Information Technology

International Conference on Computing and Control Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 12 & 13 April, 2012 Receiver: is: Where: IV. QPSK AND QAM OFDMMODELS The general analytic expression for M-ary PSK waveform

Fig. 1(b): Software reconfigurable receiver block

III. INTEROPERABILITY AND ADAPTABILITY While programmable devices serve as the heart of the hardware platform within SDR systems, the software-based transceiver enjoys its flexibility and adaptability for many applications. For example, certified software components compliant with 802.11 Wi-Fi standards are guaranteed to be interoperable with other modules. Note that the 802.11standard is part of a family of IEEE standards devoted to characterize local and wide area networks. These standards deal with the physical layer and data link layers defined by the international standards organization open systems interconnect(ISO-OSI). Hence, the interoperability among different operational modes in wireless networks is achieved via software modules with relatively low cost on development Since the wireless channel varies with time, link adaptation is recommended in order to support reliable communications and maximize the throughput. For example, IEEE 802.16 and802.11n standards define a large set of modulation and coding schemes to facilitate this goal. Moreover, adaptive modulation schemes can be used to minimize the required antenna sizes of the link, while still being able to transport high capacities. This may reduce antenna front end equipment costs. More notably, this will also reduce continuing rise rent costs, which are a significant portion of operating costs for many commercial Service providers. On the other hand, in the new deployment With cognitive radio techniques, adaptive modulation may be used to optimize spectrum usage, and minimize annual frequency lease costs. As a result, efficient and practical link adaptive techniques are needed for wireless networks. The software modulation and demodulation modules of DSP based architecture can be efficiently updated and switched to meet this new design requirement. For this reason, we focus on the software models in the following Sections. Specifically, the M-ary phase shift keying (PSK), and fast Fourier transform (FFT) modules of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems [4-5] are discussed. The M-ary QAM (16-QAM and 64-QAM) case has been reported in [6] and will not be presented in this paper. The channel or the medium through which the communication is processed is software programmed. We define the boundary/scope of a signal detected at the receiver.

The parameter E is symbol energy, is symbol time duration. The quadrature PSK (QPSK) modulation, M=4, and the modulation data signal shifts the phase of the waveform The QPSK bandwidth efficiency is 2 bits/Hz.Like many digital modulation schemes, the constellation diagram is a useful representation. In QAM, the constellation points are usually arranged in a square grid with equal vertical and horizontal spacing, although other configurations are possible (e.g. Cross-QAM). Since in digital telecommunications the data are usually binary, the number of points in the grid is usually a power of 2 (2, 4, 8 ...). Since QAM is usually square, some of these are rare. The most common forms are 16-QAM, 64-QAM and 256-QAM. By moving to a higher-order constellation, it is possible to transmit more bits per symbol. However, if the mean energy of the constellation is to remain the same (by way of making a fair comparison), the points must be closer together and are thus more susceptible to noise and other corruption. This results in a higher bit error rate and so higher-order QAM can deliver more data less reliably than lower-order QAM, for constant mean constellation energy. A. Baseband OFDM Transmitter The OFDM transmitter can be implemented by using a regular IFFT, but without dividing the outputs by N as follows:

Where is the predefined data symbol from bit stream and , n= 0,1,.....N-1.Represents the corresponding orthogonal frequencies of the N sub-carriers. Fig. 2.a shows a simplified OFDM transmitter block diagram. Note that the S/P is the serial-to-parallel converter and P/S is the parallel-to serial converter. All baseband operations are software-based processing modules. After P/S, the digital signal stream is then passed through the software programmed channel and transmitted wirelessly. B. Baseband OFDM Receiver The simplified receiver architecture is depicted in Fig. 2.b. At the receiver, the received signal is down converted. Assuming that the synchronization process has performed, the digital sampled signal is passed through S/P, FFT processing, P/S,and demodulation operation. The final detected signal of the mthOFDM symbol in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN)channel is represented as follows.

ISBN 978-1-4675-2248-9 2012 Published by Coimbatore Institute of Information Technology

International Conference on Computing and Control Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 12 & 13 April, 2012 Where The mapper converts input data into complex valued constellation points, according to a given constellation. Which constellation is to choose depends on the channel quality. Three examples of how the constellations can be chosen are: 1. Only one constellation is included, which is often the case in low-end transmitters. How to choose the included constellation is a design decision, depending on the delay and multipath propagation situation. 2. More than one constellation is included, but only one constellation is used per OFDM frame, which is the case in the Hiperlan/2 and IEEE 802.11a standards. The choice of constellation, can be based on measurements of the BER. 3. More than one constellation is included, where each subcarrier can use a different constellation. This is called bit loading. Bit-loading algorithms base the choice of constellation on the frequency response in each subcarrier. A subcarrier with high SNR will get a larger constellation and vice versa. Thus a flexible transmitter must provide the user with the possibility to use one of several constellations for each subcarrier. iii. IFFT and FFT As shown in Figs 2(a) and 2(b), the IFFT and FFT [5-6] are the most time consuming part of the base-band OFDM processing for transmitter and receiver, respectively. Note that the IFFT operation can be performed using the FFT operation depicted in Fig. 5. By swapping the real and imaginary parts of the input sequence and swapping the real and imaginary parts of the output sequence, the FFT function is employed for the IFFT computation. Hence, if the OFDM transceiver is operated in time division multiplexing (TDM) mode, there is no additional hardware or software required for using the OFDM transmitter and receiver separately. In other words, one DSP should be able to handle both IFFT and FFT operations if its throughput is fast enough. Due to the simplicity, the radix-2, decimation-in-time FFT algorithm is chosen, implemented, and used for both IFFT and FFT operation at the transmitter and receiver, respectively. The butterfly is the smallest computational unit and implemented by Verilog HDL code.

Fig.2 a. Block Diagram of Simplified OFDM Transmitter

Fig. 2. b.: Block Diagram of Simplified OFDM Receiver

C. Algorithms: i. QPSK Modulated Signal QPSK waveform is another form of angle modulation where four output phases are possible for a single carrier frequency. With the four different output phase possibilities, there must also be four corresponding input conditions (00, 01, 11, 10), which enjoy for the Gray code QPSK system to transmit twice as many data bits as the BPSK system with the same transmission bandwidth. Two serial bits b0b1 form a QPSK symbol. The b0 bit is used to encode the in-phase axis I and b1 bit is used to encode the quadrature axis Q. QPSK signal constellation with Gray coding is illustrated in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3. QPSK Signal Constellation with Gray Coding

ii.

64-QAM modulated signal

Fig. 5: The FFT operation of IFFT

Fig. 4: Illustration of 64-QAM modulated signal

iv. Software Channel The channel used in this paper is a software defined AWGN noise which will be introduced into the transmitted signal by MATLAB programming and the same noise will be reduced

ISBN 978-1-4675-2248-9 2012 Published by Coimbatore Institute of Information Technology

International Conference on Computing and Control Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 12 & 13 April, 2012 by the different constant constellation points depending on the Modulating signal mapper values which are in complex valued form. V. EXPERIMETAL RESULTS
TABLE 1 OFDM LENGTH VS PROGRAMME MEMORY FOR TWIDDLE FACTORS. N-Point FFT/IFFT 16 64 256 1024 Memory Size (16-bit word) 17 129 769 4,097

Fig. 9: Simulation result of 16-bit QPSK Transmitted signal

VI. APPLICATIONS TO IMAGE DATA A 256X 256 Bit image file was used to test the respective N=64 OFDM FFT which depict the effects of AWGN on the image quality using QPSK and QAM schemes discussed. Total number of OFDM frames needed is 8100 for QPSKOFDM; As Ec/No (individual OFDM carrier energy to onesided spectral density of additive white Gaussian noise ratio) at the receiver increases, the image degradation improves. The execution time can be further reduced by several approaches, such as increased clock rate, multiple faster DSP engines, higher level signalling modulations (16-QAM, 64-QAM), longer length (256- or 1024-point) FFT, etc.

Fig.6: simulation output result of 64-QAM at receiver

Fig. 10: Input image at the transmitter part for 64-bit QAM

Fig. 7: simulation output result of 16-QPSK at the receiver

Fig. 11: Received image at the output of receiver for 64-bit QAM

VII. CONCLUSION This paper presents a SDR system using OFDM transceiver. Both the interoperability and adaptability among QPSK and 64-QAM operational modes of the OFDM systems is discussed. Software defined antennas are implemented by using this approach through MATLAB programming. Adaptive modulation can be applied to this system which minimizes the antenna sizes in physical world, while still being able to provide high data rate. The software modulation and demodulation modules of a DSP-based architecture can be

Fig. 8: simulation result of Transmitted 64-bit QAM signal

ISBN 978-1-4675-2248-9 2012 Published by Coimbatore Institute of Information Technology

International Conference on Computing and Control Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 12 & 13 April, 2012 updated or reconfigured to meet these design requirements as discussed in this paper. Additionally, differences and similarities in data carrying capabilities between QPSK- and 64-QAM of OFDM systems and the associated clock cycles required to demodulate data using FFT programming methods are provided. Higher execution speed is achieved by using this method. The tradeoff of this optimization is a larger program memory requirement of verilog code. Programming of FFT code and the QPSK-OFDM combination come with a resulting cost associated with an increase in clock cycles, which must be taken into consideration. REFERENCES
[1] Rivet et al., A disruptive architecture dedicated to software definedradio, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst II: Express Briefs, vol. 55, no. 4, April2008, pp. 344-348. SDR Forum, www.sdrforum.org. B. Kelley, Software Defined Radio for Broadband OFDMProtocols, Proc. IEEE Intern. Conf. Systems, Man, Cybernetics, SanAntoniou, TX, Oct. 2009, pp. 2309-2314. H. G. Yeh and C. C. Wang, New Parallel Algorithm For Mitigating TheFrequency Offset of OFDM Systems, Proc. IEEE VTC Fall 2004, pp.2087-2091, Sept, L.A. H. G. Yeh and V. R. Ramirez, Implementati on and Performance of aMary PSK and QAM OFDM System in a TMS320VC5416 DigitalSignal Processor, Proc. 2nd Intern. Conf. on Digital Communications,Santa Clara, CA, July, 2007. W. H. Chang and T. Nguyen, An OFDM -specified lossless FFTarchitecture, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst II: Express Briefs, vol. 53, no.6, pp. 1235-1243, June 2006.

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ISBN 978-1-4675-2248-9 2012 Published by Coimbatore Institute of Information Technology