Design and laboratory testing of 802.15.4 2.4 GHz baseband modem

The 802.15.4 was chosen by Zigbee as the physical layer due to its characteristics; low power and low hardware complexity. This will make it available in a large number of devices ranging from remote controls to wireless sensors. We present a design for the Baseband section of the PHY and a laboratory testing environment where the real world impairments are simulated and controlled by the user to test the hardware implementation in real time. The Modem was implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) software defined radio (SDR).