wiki:OFDMReferenceDesign

Note for WARP v3 Users: the newly released 802.11 Reference Design provides similar functionality as the OFDM Reference Design, but can inter-operate with standard 802.11 devices.

WARP OFDM Reference Design

The WARP OFDM Reference Design implements a real-time network stack on a WARP node. The design includes a MIMO OFDM physical layer and flexible MAC interface for building custom protocols. This design demonstrates the full MAC/PHY capabilities of WARP. All processing (hardware control, signal processing, MAC protocol) is executed in real-time by each WARP node. PCs can be attached to WARP nodes via Ethernet, but are used only for traffic generation/analysis.

This design draws from many parts of the WARP repository. Each release integrates known-good, interoperable versions of each component. All of the MAC and PHY components are open-source and are available in the repository.

We have built a number of applications on top of the OFDM Reference Design. A few basic applications are included with the reference design project to help get started with custom research applications.

The table below lists the current reference design release for each version of WARP hardware. For the full history of releases, see the release history.

Hardware Release Date Posted ISE Ver Arch Release Notes Download
WARP v3 18.1 16-Nov-2012 13.4 MB/PLB Notes w3_OFDM_ReferenceDesign_v18p1.zip (17MB)
WARP v2 18.0 30-Aug-2012 13.4 PPC/PLB Notes w2_OFDM_ReferenceDesign_v18p0.zip (16MB)
WARP v1 16.2 31-Aug-2012 10.1.03 PPC/PLB Notes w1_OFDM_ReferenceDesign_v16p2.zip (13MB)

Note: Projects built in ISE 13.4+ use the Xilinx SDK for software development. Please see our SDK notes for instructions on re-creating a working SDK workspace using the reference design files.

For WARP v1 and v2, this design assumes clocks are connected according to the convention illustrated in the clock connection howto.

Reference Design Structure

The design consists of the following components:

  • MAC Application: top-level C code implementing a wireless MAC protocol.
  • WARPMAC framework: Low-level PHY control and MAC primitives, implemented in C code
  • OFDM PHY: FPGA implementation of the OFDM physical layer, built in System Generator
  • Support Peripherals: Other peripheral cores in the FPGA (timer, radio bridges, etc.)

Last modified 11 years ago Last modified on Aug 4, 2013, 7:53:49 PM