Software/Hardware Design And Verification Of MAC For Wireless Sensor Network

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been a period of rapid growth, the research of wireless sensor networks becomes a hot topic. when we see from the development angle,the wireless and networking of medical system production will be the trend, and the products which have the capacity of moving and the function of wireless networking will be the mainstream in the market of the future.The WSN system that satisfies IEEE 802.15.4 is successfully commercialized. The IEEE Std. 802.15.4 specifies the functions in both of the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers of the networks. In MAC layer, it employs FFD and RFD as two kinds of fundamental device and specifys the rools of communication. The means of media access method is also defined.In physical layer, it defines the method that has 20kbps, 40kbps and 250kbps data transfer rates with BPSK, O-QPSK modulation at 898Mhz/915Mhz/2.4GHz band carrier.This paper presents the Software/Hardware co-design and verification of MAC processor, which accorded with IEEE Std. 802.15.4. This MAC processor is implemented with an embedded processor and verified with FPGA chip. The design of MAC processor includes hardware and software. The hardware includes data packet transmitting part, receiving part and control part. The software part, which is also as firmware, mainly includes MAC application program and C code for interface modules. The MAC application is written by C code, and all of the application code is developed under keil C tools.A verification platform for MAC system is built, which consists of Xilinx FPGA and RF chips CC1000. Verification of basic MAC Functions is accomplished successfully.