| The wireless LAN (WLAN) has been 1 of the fastest growing technologies since it was introduced. The current available WLAN products support IEEE-802.11a, IEEE-802.11b, and IEEE-802.11g standards in Distribution Coordination Function (DCF) mode.; The heart of a WLAN embedded system is the base-band processor, which includes Physical layer that handles the wireless modem interface and software components to implement the Medium Access Control protocol. There are many difficulties in designing WLAN base-band processor. Most of problems are in the area of hardware-software partition and interfaces, which must be defined appropriately to meet the WLAN protocol requirements. In this thesis, we shall identify and analyze these problems and present recommendations for an overall hardware-software architecture of an embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) designed to handle the WLAN application supporting the IEEE-802.11a standard. |
