THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE IEEE 802.11 MAC BASED ON SOFT-CORE PROCESSOR AND RTOS

The implementation method of the IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control （MAC） protocol is mainly based on DSP （Digital Signal Processor）/ARM （Advanced Reduced instruction set computer Machine） processor or DSP/ARM IP （Intellectual Property） core. This paper presents a method based on Nios II soft-core processor embedded in Altera＇s Cyclone FPGA （Field Programmable Gate Array） and MicroC/OS-II RTOS （Real-Time Operation System）. The benefits and drawbacks of above methods are compared, and then the method presented in this paper is described. The hardware and software partitioning are discussed; the hardware architecture is also illustrated and the MAC software programming is described in detail. The presented method has some advantages, such as low cost, easy-implementation and very suitable for the implementation of IEEE 802.11 MAC in research stage.