Realization of DBF-OFDM Transceiver for Vehicular Communication Using FPGA Chip

Following the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) vehicular communications IEEE802.11p physical layer standards, this paper implements the OFDM baseband processing modules on the FPGA platform. The digital beam-forming (DBF) smart antenna technology is applied for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transceiver to identify the cars on the highway and to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance in applications of DSRC vehicular communication transceivers on the vehicle position system (VPS)-based electronic toll collection (ETC) system. Three-element array antenna is chosen in order to satisfy the FPGA chip's constraint of processing 108 bits data per time clock. The experimental results demonstrate that three-element DBF-OFDM is superior to SISO-OFDM about 4dB gain in signal to noise ratio (SNR). Both the DBF-OFDM and SISO-OFDM operated in 13ns delay spread fading channel have the better performance than 26ns delay spread fading channel when the BER is 10-5. The performance for both the DBF-OFDM and SISO-OFDM systems operated in 60km/h user speed is better than 120km/h user speed.