A Fast Architecture Exploration Method for High Throughput IEEE 802.11e MAC Implementation Using SystemC

This paper presents a fast and systematic architecture exploration method that realizes an efficient IEEE 802.11e based hardware/software co-design Medium Access Control (MAC) system architecture, which can achieve near theoretical MAC throughput for burst data transmission while complying with strict channel access time requirements. Our design approach uses SystemC based Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) framework to integrate reconfigurable general purpose computing and communication resources into the application model for rapid evaluation of core parameters, system performance, and application specific optimizations. As a result, a MAC system architecture that achieves a simulated MAC throughput of more than 100Mbps when transmitted at 260Mbps of Physical Layer (PHY) data rate is obtained. This result is verified with X-X-IMPLEMENTATION on a Xilinx Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board.