Design and Implementation of A Real-Time
ERP-OFDM SDR Receiver on the USRP2 Platform
Kerem Kucuk
Department of Computer Engineering
Kocaeli University
Kocaeli, Turkey
Email: kkucuk@kocaeli.edu.tr
Abstract-In this paper, the real time ERP-OFDM wireless lo­
cal area network (WLAN) receiver prototype and its performance
analysis based on IEEE 802.11g physical layer requirements
are presented. We design and implement a sotware deined
radio (SDR) receiver for all ERP-OFDM WLAN functionalities.
The receiver prototype setup based on the universal sotware
radio peripheral 2 called USRP2 with National Instruments
(NI) LabVIEW sotware. It consists of a dipole antenna, the
USRP2, and a computer setup USRP2 driver. In this prototype
implementation, we deal with signal synchronization, phase
estimation, channel estimation, and demodulation over the real
wireless channel conditions. To validate the real-time prototype
receiver, the spectrum of 2.4 MHz band is measured by IEEE
802.11g supported Wi-Fi card. Moreover, the prototype receiver
and Wi-Fi card performances are in very closed agreement with a
frame error rate of 1 %. Hence, this prototype has been designed
successfully to implement all PHY functions of ERP-OFDM.
Keywords-IEEE 802.11g, OFDM, SDR, USRP2, LabVIEW,
Real-Time, Receiver.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless local area networks (WLAN) have been used with
the increasing capacity and wide range applications [1] in
the last decade. Rapid prototyping and veriication of the
WLAN receiver are important to determine the WLAN system
performance. To adapt and to meet requirements of these
systems, software deined radio (SDR) implementations is
relied. Prototyping WLAN receivers on SDR platform that is
universal software radio peripheral 2 (USRP2) is becoming a
common technology for research to education [2].
The one of the most popular PRY in IEEE standards is
ERP-OFDM [3]. The OFDM technique achieves the robust­
ness against narow-band interference. To use the overlapping
multi-carrier technique, however it requires reducing crosstalk
among sub-carriers, which means that orthogonality between
the dilerent modulated carriers is provided. In the IEEE
802.11g standard, the OFDM based transmission technique
provides a WLAN with data payload communication capabil­
ities of 6-54 Mbitls. The IEEE 802.11g [3] uses mainly OFDM
technique but can promote spread spectrum modulation if any
one component of the system has older equipment.
This study has been supported by the Scientiic and Technological Research
Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under project grant I059BI91000372 and
Scientiic Research Project Units of Kocaeli University under project grant
2013/13.
ISBN: 978-1-4673-9609-7 ©2016 IEEE
In the literature, there are some SDR based receiver designs
to measure speciic characteristics in the desired network.
Digital beacon receiver presented in [4] uses USRP to measure
high frequency beacon measurement. In [5], test method is ap­
plied to receiver and transceiver I1Q imbalance measurements
on the USRP equipped with FLEXRF1800 and XCVR2450
daughter boards. Chen et al. [6] examined two hardware
platforms USRP2 and small-form-factor development platform
to quantify minimum response delay. Shah et al. [7] studied
positioning algorithm using RF signals. To demonstrate the
ability of their technique, GNU radio and its hardware com­
panion, USRP are used. The SDR IEEE 802.11 b receiver in
[8] enables practical channel impulse response estimation. The
receiver is built on GNU radio and USRP hardware.
In this paper, we have focused on the real-time imple­
mentation of ERP-OFDM WLAN protocol baseband receiver
prototype and validation of it with uncontrolled wireless
trafic. This baseband prototype has been developed to be a
valuable research and education tool in ERP-OFDM channel
measurements. The implementation is built upon National
Instruments's (NI) LabVIEW software tool [9] and Ettus
Research's universal software radio peripheral 2 (USRP2) [10]
equipped with XCVR2450 daughter board. At the receiver,
the USRP2 motherboard is placed between the RF ront-end
and the host computer. In general, conventional methods for
receiver design are prototyping on the board or programming
an ield programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. These methods
may take a longer time than to design the SDR. This prototype
design is practical to be used complete WLAN receiver.
Additionally, the baseband receiver prototype measurements
are compared to the produced Wi-Fi card measurements in
terms of frame error rate.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II revIsits
transmit modulation of ERP-OFDM. Section III explains the
theoretical background the ERP-OFDM receiver design. The
implementation of the ERP-OFDM receiver on LabVIEW
with USRP2 platform is discussed in Section IV. Section
V describes the evaluation of the prototype receiver and
performance comparison, and inally the conclusion of the
paper is presented in Section VI.
24
 II. TR ANSMIT MODULATIONS FOR ERP-OFDM SIGNAL pilot sub-carier, and M(k) expresses the mapping sub-carrier
In the ERP-OFDM transmitter, the transmitted OFDM number into requency olset index. The OFDM transmitter
frame is consists of several OFDM symbols. The frame con­ output can be written as;
tains a physical layer convergence protocols (PLCP) OFDM NsyM-1
preamble, signal ield and data portion. The OFDM preamble SDATA(t) =
L SDATA,n(t - nTsyM), (2)
has 12 symbols used to synchronize the receiver. The signal n=O
ield express the parameters of the following data packet of where NSYM is the number of transmitted OFDM symbols
the physical layer service data unit (PSDU) payload. Data part and TsyM is the symbol interval.
contains a dilerent number of symbols.
The OFDM training structure has short training (ST) sym­ III. ERP-OFDM RECEIVER DESIGN

bols and long training (LT) symbols 10 times and 2 times In the OFDM based systems such as IEEE 802.11 g, the
respectively. While the ST symbols are used for detection of discrete time OFDM signal with N sub-carriers is expressed
signal, gain control and estimation of coarse requency, the LT as [11] [12];
N-1
symbols are used for frequency and channel estimation stages.
After the IFFT and multiplied by the window function, short
x(n) =
L X(k)ej2ryn, (3)
k=O
preamble signal is obtained. Two periods of the LT symbols
are transmitted for ine requency and the channel estimation. where X(k) is the vector of complex modulation. The received
After the IFFT, adding guard interval (GI) and multiplied by data is retrieved by FFT on the received signal as;
1 k
X(k) ;::0 x(n)ej2rN k E [0,N -
the window function, time domain long preamble signal is =
1]. (4)
constituted.
The OFDM preamble is followed by the signal ield PRY If additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is considered, the
of PLCP section. It consists of the rate and length of the received OFDM signal is expressed by
y(n) x(n) @ h(n) + w(n),
transmitted data. The signal ield encoding is performed with =
(5)
the BPSK modulation and convolutional encoding (CE) at
R =
1/2. The signal ield encoding procedure includes CE, where hen) is the channel impulse response (CIR). The mul­
interleaving, modulation mapping, pilot insertion, and OFDM tipath CIR is described;
technique. The OFDM signal ield is followed by the data L-1
ield. Data ield contains two octets zero for service ield that h(n) =
L hzej2rin,TN 6, - TZ ), (6)
initializes data scrambler, variable length of data octets from z=o
medium access control (MAC) layer, encoder is reset by 6 tail where h(Z) is the CIR of Zth path, L is the number of the total
bits and required pad bits. The data ield encoding procedure propagation paths,fD, is the Doppler requency of the lth path,
includes scrambling, CE, puncturing, interleaving, modulation A is the index of the delay spread and TZ is the delay of the Zth
mapping process, pilot insertion, and OFDM modulation. The path. After discarding GI from yen), FFT processing is done
data ield is scrambled by the frame synchronous scrambler. on the received signals. Then the time domain received signals
The convolutional encode of the transmitter of the ERP-OFDM are transformed to the frequency domain signals.
uses the standard generator polynomials. The higher data rates
1 - n
are achieved by using other rates and puncturing patterns. Y(k) =
r ;::0 y(n)e j2ry k E [0,N - 1]. (7)
The data interleaving of ERP-OFDM is deined by two step
Assume that the GI is longer than the length of CIR, that
permutation. While the irst step provides coded bits with non­
is, there is no lSI between OFDM symbols, the transformed
adjacent sub-carriers, the second step provides coded bits with
signals Y(k) can be expressed by:
the less and more signiicant bits of the constellation.
The output of the modulation mapping process is translated Y ( k) =
X(k)H(k) + W(k)k =
... , N
0,1, - 1, (8)
time domain by 64-point IFFT. The transmitter output for one
where W(k) is AWGN Fourier transform, the discrete re­
OFDM symbol can be expressed as;

(�
quency impulse response of multi-path channel H(k) is written
N l M(k).dt-TGT) as;
sin(nln T)
SDATA,n(t) WTS(t) + dk,nej2r
in T nIn � -J' 2nT, k
H(k) hZej2r ,. ., e
=

k=O N (9)
=

NST/2
Pkej2rk.F(t-TGJ) , (1)
)
The transmitted signals X(k) can be estimated;
+Pn+1 + L
( k)
k=-NsT/2 X(k) � , (10)
H(k)
=

where, WTS is the windowing function of duration time, To!

is the GI duration, NSD and NST are the number of data and where X(k) is the estimation of CIR. The basic OFDM re­
total sub-carriers, dk,n is the complex number coresponding ceiver used in this project is shown in Fig. 1. After the received
to the kth sub-carrier of the nth OFDM symbol, the frequency signal down converted to the baseband, the receiver performs
spacing is ..F, Pn is the scrambling sequence, Pk is the the preamble correlation. It is the irst data processing block of

ISBN: 978-1-4673-9609-7 ©2016 IEEE 25

 the ERP-OFDM baseband receiver. Then the receiver estimates
frequency ofset and symbol timing with the ERP-OFDM
preamble. After erasing the guard interval, the signal is applied
to FFT to demodulate the sub-carriers. The preamble and pilots
are used to correct for the channel. Demodulated sub-carriers
can be applied to de-interleaver. Finally, a Viterbi decoder and
de-scrambler decode the information bits.
In the OFDM receiver, synchronization must be performed
before it can be demodulate the sub-carriers. The synchro­
nization process consists of at least two synchronization
tasks which are timing and frequency ofset estimations. The
preamble based synchronization technique is used. The IEEE
802.11 g preamble contains the two repeated sample sequences.
In fact, the synchronization algorithms are essentially based
on determining the highest correlation between two repeated
sample sequences. Therefore, the packet detection and the
timing ofset is expressed as;
IP(d)j2
M(d) =
R(d)2 '
;r*(d k)r ( k
where
N/2
P(d) =
+ d+ + �),
R(d) L Ir(d
=
2
1
N-l
+ k)j2,
k=O
where N is length of the preamble, k = 0,... , N-l. The symbol
timing estimation can be expressed from,
t =
argmax(M(d)).
d (19)
At the receiver, the received OFDM frame is illustrated in
Fig. 2. This frame is approximately starting in 5Ls with ten
times ST signal and two times LT. The packet is set to start
at 0 and delay of correlation 16 samples. When the packet
start is received, the cross-correlation of the ST symbols cause
M( n ) to move to the highest value. The frame is observed if
the metric is higher than a threshold at determined sequential
samples. The frame synchronization is accomplished using the
second corelation decision statistic. The move of M( n ) at the
400-th sample gives an estimation of the preamble.
Using (14), the accurate preamble point of symbol
can be estimated. Then, the short preamble can be used for
St(k),
frequency ofset estimation. It's last 3 parts are assumed as
where k=O,I,. . . , 47. The coarse frequency estimation
is given by;
The coarse frequency estimation value is stored to be used
in the ine frequency estimation. The long preamble can be
used for ine frequency estimation. The long preamble has the
Lt(k),
two identical parts. They have totally 128 samples denoted as
where k=O,I, . . . ,127. The long preamble samples must
ISBN: 978-1-4673-9609-7 ©2016 IEEE
be corrected with the coarse frequency estimation. The coarse
correction is given by;
(16)
Then, the corrected long preamble samples are used for ine
requency estimation as follows;
al t =
1
64
L (�Lt(k)*Lt(k ) + 64) . (17)
Finally, the total phase estimation (asT + aLT) is used for
carrier requency correction for the remaining part of the rame
after the long preamble. The GI part of the OFDM symbol
is removed rom the frequency and timing ofset corrected
samples. Then the signal is sent to the FFT processing block.
The channel is assumed static over a whole frame so
that once the channel is estimated; it's response is used to
compensate the signal for the whole frame. In the literature,
there are lots of kind channel estimation techniques [13]. The
(11) most common idea is the least square (LS) solution which is
block-type. The idea of the LS is to minimize of the parameter
(Y - XH)H (Y - XH). LS channel estimate is expressed by
(12) (18)
(13)
k
The four pilot sub-carriers that are inserted into an OFDM
symbol at sub-carrier index E [-21, -7, + 7, + 21] can be used
to estimate remaining linear phase. After FFT processing and
channel compensation of the received signal, the received pilot
sub-carriers are related to the know pilot sub-carriers P n,k. The
remaining phase estimate ¢ n can be computed as;
(14)
where, k is subcarrier index. Thus the compensated signal can
be expressed as;
Yn, k =
Yn, ke(-jP,). (20)
After these processing steps, the sub-cariers of the received
OFDM symbols are demodulated into binary representation,
then these bit stream are deinterleaved, depunctured, decoded
using Viterbi algorithm and descrambled [14].
Copt IV. RE AL-TIME IMPLEMENTATION OF
RECEIVER
T HE ERP-OFDM
Real-time ERP-OFDM receiver's GUI is built in LabVIEW
as shown in Fig. 3. The Receiver Parameters In and RX
Parameters Out ields in the main.vi of ERP-OFDM GUI dis­
play the preamble detection, PSDU information and received
signal, received signal data rate, time synchronization diagram,
(IS) signal constellation, signal ield demodulation and service
ield & PSDU demodulation ields. They show the speciic
information depends on captured signal. ERP-OFDM program
blocks implemented in LabVIEW are illustrated in FigA.
These blocks provide basic OFDM receiver requirements. A
brief summary of each blocks task in ERP-OFDM receiver are
explained as follow.
26
 Frequency
Demodulator
Estimation

Binary
Timing
output Descrabler Deinterleaver
Estimation
data

Fig. I. Typical block diagram of the OFOM receiver.

O Received OFDM frame

s O --
�
-

�
� -10

�
.� -20 .."'1.1"'1,''
!
0
J
� -30
E
o o 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
z
Time (�s)

Fig. 2. Captured OFDM frame in dB scale

Fig. 3. ERP-OFDM receiver GUI screen.

1) Carrier Detection Block: implements averaging low pass
ilter on a series of digital samples from captured data.
2) RX Filter Block: accepts the low pass ilter output as
input and decides signal detection when the threshold value is
between the two consecutive input signal. Both RX Filter and
Carrier Detection blocks constitute carrier sense mechanism.
3) Frame Detection Block: detects ERP-OFDM rame
based on the timing metric in 80 consecutive samples. Here,
the threshold is chosen 0.8.
4) Time Synchonization Block: provides timing synchro­
nization on the received OFDM frame, locates the irst sample
of the frame, and implements frame synchronization.

ISBN: 978-1-4673-9609-7 ©2016 IEEE 27

 Fig. 4. ERP-OFDM receiver program blocks in LabVIEW.
5) CFO Estimation Block: computes and corrects of the
CFO on the received signal.
6) Channel Estimation Block: can compute the channel's
coeficients.
7) Phase ffset Block: computes the phase and corrects the
remaining phase olset.
8) BPSK Demodulation Block: maps each sub-carrier back
into the 0 and l.
9) De-Interleaver Block: is used as a de-interleaver. It
performs two inverse step of an interleaver. This block uses
rate dependent parameters to de-interleave the bit sequence
from [3].
10) Viterbi Decoder Block: decodes bit stream using
Viterbi algorithm with forward error corection. The trace back
depth is usually used 8 and 10 times constraint length for 2/3
and 3/4 rate puncturing codes. In our design, trace back length
is used 10 times constraint length.
11) Signal Field Determination Block: provides data rate
parameters, number of octet and symbol in the OFDM frame.
This block also implements irst bit level correction using
parity check bit over the irst 18 bits of the signal ield. If this
correction is failed, then the demodulation process is inished.
If the correction is passed, then the demodulation process is
continued through CFO Correction Block. This information is
shown in ERP-OFDM GUI's Signal Field Demodulation area.
12) CFO Correction Block: corrects the remaining received
signal samples. The length of corection is determined previ­
ous block.
13) Channel Correction Block: implements channel equal­
ization over the input signal using the coeficients from Chan­
nel Estimation Block.
14) Phase Correction Block: corrects phase olset over the
input signal.
ISBN: 978-1-4673-9609-7 ©2016 IEEE
15) Data Demodulation Block: provides each subcarier
with the binary representation depends on its modulation
schemes determined by Signal Field Determination Block.
16) De-scambler Block: de-scrambles the output of the
BPSK Demodulation Block using the standard generator poly­
nomial.
17) CRC-32 Block: computes CRC-32. In the ERP-OFDM
signal, service and data is protected with CRC-32 by the
polynomial as in the standard.
PSDU Determination Block extracts octets from the bit se­
quence and determines frame control ield which says protocol
version, frame type, sub-type, and some information about
the frame. After determining the type and sub-type of frame,
this block extract all information based on the frame. Data
Display Block shows and saves the information determined
for each ERP-OFDM signal until stop button is used. Lastly,
if a problem causes in the program, Eror Out ield lists the
error information with the LabVIEW code.
V. SDR RECEIVER EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In order to evaluate the performance of the implemented
ERP-OFDM, IEEE 802.11 signals captured in Wireless Infor­
mation System Laboratory (WISLAB) are taken into consider­
ation. There is no any our control on the captured signal, so we
could achieved the exact real-time performance of designed
receiver in the real environment. The measurement setup of
the LabVIEW ERP-OFDM is composed of a USRP2 board
plugged to a notebook and connected to an extenal antenna.
LabVIEW NI USRP2 driver collects the data rom antenna,
the program block in LabVIEW demodulates the received
data packet, and puts in the LabVIEW GUI. The RF front­
end is a RFX2400 daughter-board with the dipole antenna.
The input data can be changed by each number of samples
block of LabVIEW during the program is in progress. The
28
 TABLE I
LAB VIEW RECEIVER PARAMETERS.
Parameter ERP-OFDM
Device Names 192.168.10.3
Active Antenna RX2
Rx Sampling Rate 20M
Rx Gain 40dB
Number of samples 400000
802.11 Channel 12
CS Threshold 5e-5
o dB attenuation
2_72%
1271 0071 1252 120E 0678 1270 1078 1250 DC5D othr
MAC address
Fig. 5. ERP-OFDM receiver frame error rates for the laboratory experiment.
captured data are processed to LabVIEW block to get real-time
results. In this case, the experimental results can be shown on
LabVIEW GUI screen window in real time. The spectrum of
WLAN is measured and saved both the prototype receiver and
PC which has a Wi-Fi card at the same time. The main GUI
parameters of the design SDR receiver are shown in Table I.
In Fig. 5, the frame error rate and channel estimation with
one LT at channel 1 in 2.4 GHz are reported for the determined
most packet generated nine wireless devices. We record 10000
captured rames. Fig. 5(a) shows number of IEEE 802.11
frame type with frame error rate for each wireless devices.
Even if the irst MAC address has the most number of frames
which is almost 2500 and almost 110 data rames, it's frame
error rate is only 2.72%. The second MAC address has the
most frame error rate which rames are data rames. The other
bar represents the remaining MAC address determined by the
receiver. The receiver has captured frames rom 115 diferent
wireless devices for this case. All of this MAC addresses have
also corrected by software wireless snifer. When the frame
error rates are compared between the prototype receiver and
Wi-Fi card, Wi-Fi card provides better frame error rate within
1% for all captured rames. This error behavior is expected
because the receiver prototype is determine the carrier with
the IQ signals in the baseband stage.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the design of real-time SDR receiver com­
patible with the ERP-OFDM and its blocks on the LabVIEW
software with the USRP2 driver are presented. The receiver
ISBN: 978-1-4673-9609-7 ©2016 IEEE
prototype ensures the real time data samples reception. The
lexibility of the NI LabVIEW software agree to user easily
matching the receiver to provide a real-time throughput of
different data rate while operating at 2.4 GHz. This receiver
models is tested on the actual wireless environment and oper­
ates accurately shown with the frame error rate results. Clearly,
the designed receiver has the potential to implement other
signal processing techniques to improve receiver performance
that requires less frame error rate. The main advantage of this
receiver is that constructed using LabVIEW program blocks
instead of other receiver test-beds that are normally dedicated
systems and when the user wants to see performance any other
algorithms, this prototype receiver can be easily updated.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Dr. Murat Torlak for
his many valuable comments and suggestions to improve the
quality of the paper.
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