Physical layer interface for IEEE 802.11 MAC

Abstract: There are several standards for wireless communication. People that are involved in computers and networking recognize names like Bluetooth, HiperLAN and IEEE 802.11. A fundamental part of an IEEE 802.11 node is the Medium Access Controller. It establishes and controls communication with other nodes, using a physical layer unit. This is the work that was carried out as a master thesis project at Ericsson Microelectronics. The main goal was to design, implement and evaluate a hardware interface between the MAC and the physical layer. An important part of the work was to find a suitable partition scheme for hardware and software and to achieve this, an investigation of processor-cycles usage was carried out to support design decisions. The hardware/software partition resulted in hardware-functionality for decode of received frames and automatic transmission of acknowledge frames.