Flexible platform design of IEEE 802.15.3a MAC over UWB with optimized protocol accelerator

IEEE 802.15.3a is assumed to be candidate MAC protocol for emerging UWB techniques. To make MAC system flexible, configurable and easy to upgrade, we tried to make most of MAC functionalities as software/firmware process running in CPU for controlling UWB network card and maintaining high-data-rate WPAN network. But 480Mbps data rate requires some MAC functionality to respond in several microseconds and it is beyond the capability of current software without any hardware preprocessing. After carefully analyzing the bottleneck of timing requirements, we put forward an optimized MAC hardware protocol accelerator and integrated it in our flexible HW/SW system. Performance analysis shows that the throughput, delay etc. were greatly improved