An FPGA Based Reconfigurable MAC Architecture for Universal Short Range Communication Networks

The wireless universal short-distance network refers to a heterogeneous network that combines multiple wireless short-distance networks such as wireless local area networks and wireless personal area networks. Users can choose to use different multiple access protocols to access the network according to the characteristics of the service. This paper proposes an FPGA-based reconfigurable MAC architecture, which uses a combination of software and hardware to select the working mode of the universal MAC in the FPGA through ARM, so as to achieve fast switching between different networks. The proposed universal MAC module includes a control module based on finite state machine and a data frame transceiver module, it implements the function of switching between different networks by configuring the control module as different finite state machine of different MAC protocols. A universal MAC module combining ALOHA protocol and CSMA/CA protocol is designed and implemented in this paper. The simulation results show that the designed universal MAC module is equivalent to the CSMA/CA protocol in terms of resource utilization, and can be flexibly switching between ALOHA protocol and CSMA/CA protocol.