Advancing wireless communications
The PACWOMAN project focused on designing enabling technologies for inexpensive and secure wireless personal area networks. These technologies involve physical or media access control layers that allow low-power operation and scalability. Advanced networking concepts were also developed for optimising the communication load. Taking into consideration the "open nature" of wireless communications special emphasis was also placed on security aspects. In addition, a gateway was also developed that allows connection to the external wide area environments being either wired or wireless. One of the key project results was the development of a highly flexible Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter. This transmitter allows easy adaptation of the radio system to changes in the interference situation on the channel and hence, may lead to achievement of high spectrum efficiency. Selection of the OFDM standard was made due to its extended applications that range from voice communication to high-speed data transfers without significant power consumption and hardware complexity. The OFDM transmitter features a flexible architecture, where each unit consists of small, independent subunits. Depending on the configuration the subunits may be turned on or off in order to reduce the power consumption. The digital baseband parts include a data encoder, a mapper, a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for transformations from frequency to time domain and a cyclic prefix. The cyclic prefix eases equalisation of the signal and prevents the propagation of interference to the receiver. For further information click at: http://www.imec.be/pacwoman/