VHDL Modeling of Wi-Fi MAC Layer for Transmitter

For the wireless communication in radio frequency range, IEEE 802.11 is one of the many standards available. IEEE 802.11b defines the medium access control layer [MAC] for wireless local area networks. The wireless local area network, WLAN is dominated by IEEE 802.11 standard. It becomes one of the main focuses of the WLAN research. Now most of the ongoing research projects are simulation based as their actual hardware implementation is not cost effective. The main core of the IEEE 802.11b standard are the CSMA\CA, Physical and MAC layers. But only MAC layer for transmitter is modeled in this paper using the VHDL. The VHDL (Very High Speed Hardware Description Language) is defined in IEEE as a tool of creation of electronics system because it supports the development, verification, synthesis and testing of hardware design, the communication of hardware design data and the maintenance, modification and procurement of hardware. It is a common language for electronics design and development prototyping. The main purpose of the IEEE 802.11 standard is to provide wireless connectivity to devices that require a faster installation, such as Laptops, PDA's or generally mobile devices inside a WLAN. MAC procedures are defined here for accessing the physical medium, which can be infrared or radio frequency. Here Wi-Fi MAC transmitter module is divided in to 5 blocks i.e. data unit interface block, controller block, pay load data storage block, MAC header register block, data processing block. In this paper, we are considering only two blocks i.e pay load data storage block & data processing block. So other blocks i.e. data unit interface block, controller block, MAC header register block are not discussed further in this paper.