IEEE 802.11 OFDM Software Defined Radio beacon frame transmission

Abstract

A transmit chain test bed is used in the project presented in this paper to test an 802.11g OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) Software Defined Radio (SDR) base station beacon frame transmitter. Several prior Gnuradio test bed setups show how a Gnuradio SDR Transmitter is able to communicate with another Gnuradio SDR. This paper additionally shows how a Gnuradio SDR Transmitter is able to visibly communicate with off-the-shelf 802.11 WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) off-the-shelf chips. Results of the implementation show that a SDR base station is successfully able to communicate with traditional WLAN off-the-shelf communication chips found inside devices such as laptops, netbooks and mobile phones, which were used as the OFDM beacon frame receptors.