Semester9 Report

Link adaptation for IEEE 802.
11a WLAN over fading channel

Department of Communication Technology Aalborg University January 2nd, 2004
Mobile Communications Group 992, the 9th Semester
AALBORG UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

Fredrik Bajersvej 7
Title: Project period: Project group:
DK-9220 Aalborg East
Phone 96 35 80 80
Link adaptation for IEEE 802.11a WLAN over fading channel The 9th Semester, September 2003 to January 2004 Mobile Communcations Group 992
Abstract
The IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard and its variations are potential candidates for an united international standard. Most of the studies on the standard have assumed error-free or simple independent uniformly-distributed bit errors in the channel, which does not represent the realistic usage scenarios of WLAN. In practice, WLAN connection often experiences time-varying frequency-selective fading, which not only degrades the link quality considerably, but also makes its bit and packet error patterns more complicated. In this project, we develop a simulator to analyse extensively the performance of the IEEE 802.11a standard under frequency-selective fading conditions. The IEEE 802.11a provides eight dierent data rates, which can be used for link adaptation. Link adaptation, which selects the most appropriate data rate for transmission according to instantaneous channel conditions, is one of those techniques to reduce the negative eects of channel fading. Using our simulator, we analyse the performance of a simple, but powerful, link adaptation mechanism under practical channel models. We also examine the eects of its parameters and propose possible modications to the original scheme.
Participant:
Nguyen Cong Huan Nguyen Tien Duc Francesco Davide Calabrese Jose Manuel Gonzlez Navarro Sergio Fernndez Pastor
Supervisors:
Hiroyuki Yomo Tatiana Kozlova Madsen
Publications: Number of pages: Finished:
9 127 the 2nd of January 2004
This report must not be published or reproduced without permission from the project group Copyright c 2003-2004, Project Group Mob992, Aalborg University
Preface
This report is written during the project period of the 9th semester at the Department of Communication Technology, Institute of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University.
Report Structure
The report documents the implementation, results, analyses and conclusions of our project. Its content is, therefore, divided into 5 parts:
Chapter 1: Background of the project Chapter 2: The wireless channel Chapter 3: The IEEE 802.11a PHY and MAC layers Chapter 4: Implementation and result analysis Chapter 5: Conclusions and future works
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our special thanks to our supervisors, Hiroyuki Yomo and Tatiana Kozlova Madsen, for their thorough assistance and guidance during this project.
Nguyen Cong Huan
Nguyen Tien Duc
Francesco Davide Calabrese
Jose Manuel Gonzlez Navarro
Sergio Fernndez Pastor i
Contents
1 Background of the project
1.1 Introduction to WLAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2 1.3 Advantages and disadvantages of WLAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WLAN standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Problem denition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Objectives of the project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
1 1 3 5 5 8 8
Scope of the project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2 The wireless channel

2.1 2.2 The AWGN channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Characterisation of wireless channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.4 Path loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Large-scale fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Small-scale fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parameters of multi-path channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slow vs. fast fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flat vs frequency-selective fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
11 12 12 14 14 14 17 19 19 23
Multi-path propagation and small-scale fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3 The IEEE 802.11a PHY and MAC layers

3.1 Description of the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.2 3.3 802.11a PHY framing format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implementation of IEEE 802.11 PHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 802.11 MAC framing formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distributed Coordination Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
25 25 27 34 35 36 43
Description of IEEE 802.11 MAC layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
iv 4 Implementation and result analysis

4.1 The implementation of IEEE 802.11a simulator . . . 4.1.1 The PHY layer simulator . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 The MAC layer simulator . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.3 Choice of simulation parameters . . . . . . . . 4.1.4 Simulation scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analysis of simulation results . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Performance of the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer . 4.2.2 Performance of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer . 4.2.3 Performance of link adaptation mechanism . . Modication of link adaptation scheme . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Our proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Performance analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 The IEEE 802.11a PHY layer . . . . . 5.1.2 The IEEE 802.11a MAC layer . . . . . 5.1.3 Link adaptation scheme . . . . . . . . 5.1.4 Modication of link adaptation scheme Future works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CONTENTS 45
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 45 47 49 51 53 53 59 65 72 72 73 76
4.2
4.3
4.4 5.1
5 Conclusions and future works
77
77 77 78 79 80 80
5.2
Bibliography A List of symbols B List of acronyms C The principles of OFDM technique

C.1 The block diagram of OFDM system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C.2 Consideration of OFDM parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C.3 Advantages and disadvantages of OFDM technique . . . . . . . . . . . .
81 83 87 93
96 98 98
D Wireless environments in PHY simulation E Flowcharts of simulation functions
101 107
List of Figures
1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Classication of packet combining techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The AWGN channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Characteristics of AWGN channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A typical plane wave incident on a MS receiver [11] . . . . . . . . . . . . Example of an indoor power delay prole; rms delay spread, mean excess delay, maximum excess delay (at 10dB) and threshold level are shown [21] Classications of small-scale fading channel [21] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The baseband representation of at fading channel . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rayleigh and Ricean distributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The baseband representation of frequency-selective fading channel . . . . Format of the 802.11a PHY frame [2] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simplied block diagram for the 802.11a transmitter and receiver . . . . The block diagram of the convolutional encoder used in IEEE 802.11a [2] The puncturing patterns used in IEEE 802.11a: (a) for 3/4 rate, and (b) for 2/3 rate convolutional code [2] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The constellations of BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM dened in IEEE 802.11a standard [2] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The MAC frame formats [3]: (a) Data frame, (b) ACK and CTS frame, and (c) RTS frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MAC architecture [3] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The IEEE 802.11 Inter-Frame Spacings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The random backo mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The exponential increase of contention window . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Basic Access Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The RTS/CTS Access Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hidden terminal problem and RTS/CTS access method . . . . . . . . . . The block diagram of PHY layer simulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a station in passive mode The state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a station in active mode (basic access mode) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a station in active mode (RTS/CTS access mode) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The PDPs of various environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (a) Simulation scenario I, and (b) Scenario II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v 6 11 12 15 18 20 21 22 23 26 27 28 28 31 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 46 47 48 48 51 52
vi
4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 4.18 4.19 4.20 4.21 4.22 4.23 4.24 4.25 4.26 4.27 4.28 4.29 4.30 4.31 4.32 4.33 4.34
LIST OF FIGURES
Illustration of terminology applied for trac process[1] . . . . . . . . . . The uncoded BER of BPSK under various environments . . . . . . . . . The uncoded PER for BPSK under various environments . . . . . . . . . The convolutional coded PER under various environments (Rate Index = 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The convolutional coded PER under various environments (Rate Index = 8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The convolutional coded PER for dierent data rates . . . . . . . . . . . The uncoded BER of BPSK for dierent packet sizes . . . . . . . . . . . Total goodputs for dierent data rates (basic access method, environment A) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The probabilities of packet errors for dierent data rates (basic access method, environment A) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The probabilities of collision for dierent data rates (basic access method, environment A) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The mean transfer delay for dierent data rates (basic access method, environment A) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Total goodputs for dierent data rates (RTS/CTS access method, environment A) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The mean transfer delay for dierent data rates (RTS/CTS access method, environment A) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Total goodput at simulation scenario II (Environment A) . . . . . . . . . Probability of collision at simulation scenario II (Environment A) . . . . Total goodputs in environment A and E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Total goodput of link adaptation for basic access method . . . . . . . . . Total goodput of link adaptation for handshaking access method . . . . . Probability of collision of link adaptation for basic access method . . . . Transfer delay of link adaptation for basic access method . . . . . . . . . Transfer delay of link adaptation for handshaking access method . . . . . Average goodput of link adaptation for basic access method . . . . . . . . Average goodput of link adaptation for handshaking access method . . . Goodput for link adaptation with and without data rate 7 . . . . . . . . Proposed modication of the link adaptation scheme . . . . . . . . . . . Total goodput for modied link adaptation scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . Average goodput for modied link adaptation scheme . . . . . . . . . . . Average transfer delay for modied link adaptation scheme . . . . . . . . 53 54 55 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 62 63 64 64 65 66 67 68 69 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 75 94 95 96
C.1 The spectrums of (a) conventional FDM and (b) OFDM technique . . . . C.2 Block diagrams of (a) OFDM modulator and (b) OFDM demodulator . . C.3 Block diagrams of OFDM system based on IFFT/FFT technique . . . .
LIST OF FIGURES
C.4 The eect of guard time between OFDM symbols: (a) Without guard time, and (b) With guard time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C.5 The cyclic prex insertion and windowing processes . . . . . . . . . . . . E.1 E.2 E.3 E.4 E.5 E.6 E.7 E.8 E.9 E.10 E.11 E.12 E.13 E.14 E.15 E.16 E.17 E.18 E.19 E.20 E.21 E.22 E.23 The Random sequence generator . Binary converter module . . . . . Convolutional coder module . . . Interleaving module . . . . . . . Symbol mapping module . . . . . Symbol mapping module . . . . . Symbol mapping module . . . . . Symbol mapping module . . . . . The Serial to parallel converter . The IFFT module . . . . . . . . . The Parallel to serial module . . . Wideband channel module . . . . Wideband channel module . . . . Ricean Simulator module . . . . . AWGN channel . . . . . . . . . . FFT module . . . . . . . . . . . . Symbol demapping module . . . . Symbol demapping module . . . . Symbol demapping module . . . . Deinterleaving module . . . . . . Viterbi decoder module . . . . . . Viterbi decoder module (cont) . . Coded bit error counter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
vii
97 97 108 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 127
List of Tables
2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 Path loss exponents for dierent environments [21] . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rate-dependent parameter [2] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modulation-dependent normalization factor KM OD [2] . . . Timing-related parameters in IEEE 802.11a PHY layer [2] Timing-related parameters in IEEE 802.11a MAC layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 32 32 33 41 50 50 101 102 103 104 105
Parameters for PHY and MAC layer simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Channel models for PHY layer simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
D.1 Model A. Corresponds to a typical oce environment for NLOS conditions and 50ns average rms delay spread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D.2 Model B. Corresponds to typical large open space and oce environments for NLOS conditions and 100ns average rms delay spread . . . . . . . . . D.3 Model C. Corresponds to a typical large open space environment for NLOS conditions and 150ns average rms delay spread . . . . . . . . . . . D.4 Model D. Same as model C but for LOS conditions. A 10 dB spike at zero delay has been added resulting in a rms delay spread of about 140ns D.5 Model E. Corresponds to a typical large open space environment for NLOS conditions and 250ns average rms delay spread . . . . . . . . . . .
ix
Chapter
Background of the project

1.1 Introduction to WLAN
Wireless communication has become very popular in the last few decades. It is now possible to communicate while being mobile, in almost all areas of the globe if one considers satellite communications. Since the early 80's, when the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) was developed, digital mobile communications have succeeded in replacing the xed phones, and it has penetrated the global market like no other product ever. Since then, mobile communications have advanced into a more unied service to satisfy most, if not all, communication needs of human being. Now the same tendency has happened with computer communications. New wireless technologies, which can provide high bandwidth to users within a limited geographical area, have been developed to substitute the wired Local Area Network (LAN). Following the success story of the mobile phone, the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is experiencing dramatic growth in the recent years. According to IDC (www.idc.com), the worldwide revenue of WLAN equipment in 2001 reached USD 1.45 billion, up 34.2% from 2000, and is expected to grow to USD 3.72 billion in 2006. One potential market of the WLAN technologies is hot spot business, in which it is used to oer Internet connections at public places, such as hotels, airports, train stations and cafes. Analysys, the global advisor on telecoms and new media (www.analysys.com), forecasts there will be more than 20 millions users of public WLAN services in Europe by 2006, generating over EUR 3 billion of revenue for hot spot operators.
1.1.1 Advantages and disadvantages of WLAN

The WLAN technologies are so successful because it oers several advantages compared to the wired LAN:
Ease and speed of deployment: Many areas are dicult for deploying the traditional wired LAN. For example, running cables through walls of an old stone building to which the layouts have been lost can be a tough challenge. Even in modern facilities, contracting for cable installation can be expensive and timeconsuming. The WLAN removes the need of cable installation, and thus it is far quicker and more convenient to deploy than the wired LAN.
1

Flexibility: No cables means no re-cabling. The WLAN allows users to conveniently move their network computers from one place to another, and to quickly form small networks for meeting or group works. The WLAN also makes network expansion much easier, as the network medium is virtually ready everywhere. This is the key driving force for WLAN to succeed in the hot spot market. In addition, group of WLAN devices can form an ad-hoc network, in which they can share resources amongst each other (peer-to-peer network) without the need of an infrastructure, and therefore allows communications even in case of disasters. Mobility: The WLAN allows users to stay connected while they are roaming. Enabling users to access data while they are in motion can lead to large productivity gains.
Besides its advantages, the WLAN does have some drawbacks. First of all, the costs of WLAN components, such as adapter or Access Point (AP), are often higher than those of the wired LAN. However, this extra cost can be justied if we consider the price for cable installation and the productivity gains from the usage of WLAN. Moreover, the price of WLAN gear has recently declined and will continue to fall dramatically. Secondly, the WLAN is more prone to security issues than wired LAN, as it is easier to eavesdrop an open wireless connection. Several approaches have been employed to increase security level of the WLAN connections. For example, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has dened the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard as a security measure in its 802.11 WLAN standard, which is discussed in the next section. However, the WEP only provides minimal protection to frames in the air, and it can be completely broken by method described by Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir [6]. At the moment, the IEEE 802.11 working group has devoted an entire task group to security, which is actively working on a revised security standard. In the meantime, if high level of security is required in 802.11 system, users will have to go for proprietary approaches, but these are a single-vendor solution and only a stopgap. Thirdly, WLAN could not provide data rate as high as that of the wired LAN operating on high-bandwidth low-loss cables. The wireless channel is fundamentally dierent from coaxial cable, in the following aspects:
The allowable bandwidth for transmission is limited, because the Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum is a scarce and expensive resource. Due to path loss, transmitted signal is attenuated much faster in wireless channel. Propagation phenomena, such as large- and small-scale fading, are inevitable in wireless medium. They induce time-varying amplitude and phase changes to the received signals, making it more dicult to correctly decode the information.
1.1 Introduction to WLAN

The transmitted signals are unprotected from outside signals.
These factors often limits the maximum achievable data rate of WLAN system. Currently, various techniques are employed at both Physical Layer (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers of WLAN system, aiming at mitigating the negative eects of the wireless medium and making the best use of the allowable bandwidth. Nevertheless, searches are still going on to nd mechanisms which could improve further the performance of WLAN system.
1.1.2 WLAN standards

In early beginning, all WLAN solutions were proprietary, and devices from dierent vendors could not talk to each other. This incompatibility issue was the main barrier to the growth of WLAN. Today, various WLAN standards are available, which allows WLAN devices to inter-connect from anywhere within an oce building, campus, or the conner cafe, even if they are not from the same vendor. In this section, we discuss all the WLAN standards that are commonly-used in the market.
The HIPERLAN standard

In 1992, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) formed a committee to establish a WLAN standard for Europe, which is referred to as the HIgh PErformance Radio LAN (HIPERLAN). There are two versions of the HIPERLAN standards, which are HIPERLAN/1 and HIPERLAN/2. The HIPERLAN/1 standard was ratied in early 1996 and oers wireless communication with maximum data rate of 20Mbps at the 5GHz band. It uses Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) modulation which also has been adopted in the GSM cellular system. However, owing to the complexity of implementation and the huge processing power required, HIPERLAN/1 is seldom used commercially. Following the HIPERLAN/1 standard, HIPERLAN/2 specications were started in mid1998 and the rst specications were published in 2000. It operates at data rate up to 54Mbps, based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) technique, in the same RF band as the HIPERLAN/1, and provides very good Quality of Service (QoS) support. Its aim is to be able to work with dierent core networks, especially the third-generation (3G) cellular systems [26].
The MMAC-HiSWAN standard

The Multimedia Mobile Access Communication (MMAC) system was developed in Japan since 1996, which aims at to transmit ultra high speed, high quality Multimedia Information anytime and anywhere with seamless connections to optical bre networks. The MMAC-HiSWAN (High Speed Wireless Access Network) system uses two frequency bands: 5 GHz for HiSWANa and 25 GHz for HiSWANb. This standard is closely aligned with the ETSI HIPERLAN/2 standard. The HiSWANa specication adopts the OFDM physical layer providing a standard speed of 27Mbps and 6-36Mbps by link adaptation. However, there are some dierences between MMAC-HiSWANa and ETSI HIPERLAN in radio network functions, owing to the dierences in regional frequency planning and regulations [26].
The 802.11 standard

Adopted by the IEEE in 1997, the 802.11 has become the rst international standard for WLAN and it has been used widely in most commercial WLAN products available in the market. The IEEE 802.11 species how wireless network devices communicate with one another, and it serves as foundation to establish wireless networking standards including:
The IEEE 802.11a describes the wireless networking standard that operates in the 5GHz radio band (Unlicensed - National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) frequency band) using OFDM technique. The IEEE 802.11a-based WLANs can achieve a maximum data rate of 54Mbps, providing nearly ve-times faster networking data rate than IEEE 802.11b and can handle more trac than 802.11bbased networks. The IEEE 802.11b, commonly known as Wi-Fi, was the rst WLAN technology oered to consumers. It operates in the 2.4GHz radio band (Industrial, Scientic and Medical (ISM) frequency band) using either Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) or Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) technique. The 802.11b can achieve a maximum data rate of 11Mbps at distance up to approximately 90 meters (or 300 feet). Thanks to its early presence, the 802.11b devices are far more common than any other WLAN standards. The IEEE 802.11g is a new standard, describing a wireless networking method for WLANs that operates in 2.4GHz radio band. By using OFDM technique, 802.11gbased WLANs can achieve maximum data rate of 54Mbps. The IEEE 802.11gcompliant equipment, such as wireless AP, may provide simultaneous WLAN connectivity for both 802.11g and 802.11b equipment. It was designed largely as a reaction to the regulatory environment in some countries, and a variety of inghting and conict made this a compromise standard.
1.2 Scope of the project
The IEEE 802.11h is another variation on the 802.11a, which specically aims at satisfying European regulations for 5GHz WLANs. European radio regulations for the 5GHz band require products to have Transmission Power Control (TPC) and Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS), which are not available in 802.11a. The IEEE 802.11h is designed to provide these additional features to 802.11a standard [8].
The fact that there are so many standards available to public makes inter-operation between WLAN devices dicult. Currently, the IEEE 802.11a and its variations are promising candidates for unied international standard. Therefore, in this project, our focus is on the IEEE 802.11a standard.

1.2.1 Problem de nition
As mentioned in section 1.1.1, the performance of the IEEE 802.11a standard is limited mainly due to channel impairment. In recent years, much interest has been involved in nding new techniques to improve this situation. Here, we focus on two main techniques that are currently receiving a lot of attentions: Packet combining and Link adaptation.
Packet combining techniques

In order to maintain reliable and ecient communication over noisy channel, the IEEE 802.11a standard species a hybrid Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) for its transmission. The ARQ system provides the very low undetected error probability performance required, while the FEC system reduces the number of re-transmission by correcting as many packets in error as possible. In this FEC/ARQ scheme, the receiver discards erroneous packet that cannot be corrected by the FEC, and wait for re-transmission. Packet decoding is performed using only a single copy of re-transmitted packet and ignores the information contained in all previous copies. This is often referred to as Hybrid Type-I ARQ scheme. When channel becomes very noisy, it is possible that all packets contains uncorrectable errors. In this case, such system fails to provide a signicant throughput [16]. The basic idea behind packet combining is that a received packet always contains at least a small amount of useful information which can be exploited. Thus, packet decoding is more likely to succeed if the useful information contained in all previous copies of a packet is used. By combining the erroneous packets in an optimum manner, signicant data throughput is obtained even when the Type-I ARQ approach of just repeating packets fails [4].
6
Packet combining
Diversity combining
Code combining
Selection combining
Equal gain combining
Maximal ratio combining
HybridARQ type II
HybridARQ type III
Figure 1.1: Classi cation of packet combining techniques
Figure 1.1 shows the classication of packet combining techniques. The most commonlyused packet combining technique is diversity combining. In diversity combining, the symbols of all received copies of a packet are added up and that sum is decoded by the receiver. Diversity combining can be divided further into Selection Combining (SC), Equal Gain Combining (EGC) and Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC), depending on which technique is employed for combining the symbols. Diversity combining is relatively simple to implement in IEEE 802.11a device, as it requires no modications in the standard and the structure of 802.11a device allows the use of diversity combining without considerable increase in complexity. However, diversity combining requires that there is very low, ideally zero, level of cross-correlation between two or more copies of the same packet. If the wireless channel varies at very slow rate compared to the packet transmission rate, the system will not benet from diversity combining. The code combining was rst proposed by Chase in [4]. This technique combines all copies of the packet at codeword level with a maximum-likelihood decoder, which represents an added dimension to the above-mentioned diversity concept which is limited to combining just individual symbols. Thus, this technique provides higher performance gain than the conventional diversity combining [4]. The idea of code combining is further extended in Type-II and Type-III ARQ schemes, which are pioneered by Hagenauger [14] and Kallel [15], respectively. In the hybrid Type-II ARQ schemes, which are sometimes referred to as incremental redundancy ARQ, the transmitter starts with the highest rate code of the Rate-Compatible Punctured Codes (RCPC) family. If the rst transmission fails, the transmitter continues to send incremental code bits until the packet is received correctly. The main drawback of incremental redundancy ARQ scheme is that additional incremental code bits sent for a packet received with errors (or a packet that is lost) are not in general self-decodable. That is the decoder must rely on both the initially transmitted packet as well as the additional incremental code bits for decoding. The Type-III ARQ scheme presents a dierent class of punctured convolutional codes, namely Complementary Punctured Codes (CPC) codes. The main advantage of using the CPC codes is that any complementary sequence sent for a packet that is lost or detected with errors is self-decodable, and the receiver does not have to rely on previously

received sequences for the same data packet for decoding.
The impact of code combining on overall IEEE 802.11a performance is not well understood, and therefore should be investigated more carefully before it can be applied in the standard. Furthermore, implementation of Type-II or Type-III ARQ schemes in the IEEE 802.11a would require modications of this standard (i.e. to introduce the RCPC or CPC codes).
Link adaptation techniques

In general, the principle of link adaptation technique is to vary dierent parameters of WLAN system, such as transmitting power, data rates (i.e. coding and modulation schemes) and packet sizes, according to the simultaneous quality of the radio link in order to obtain the maximum available throughput. However, in this project, we limits the link adaptation technique to only one parameter: the data rate. The idea of link adaptation, in this sense, is to choose the most appropriate transmission mode according to channel conditions. The IEEE 802.11a supports eight dierent data rates, from 6 to 54Mbps with dierent coding and modulation schemes. While the data rates for link adaptation scheme are dened, the actual link adaptation algorithm is left open. As a result, there are many link adaptation proposals for the IEEE 802.11a. For example, a best PHY mode table is used to nd the suitable data rate according to packet size, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) value and frame retry count in [20]. This method is relatively complicated, because it requires the estimation of SNR of transmission link. Besides, the best PHY mode table might not be valid for all types of channel models, which could induce negative eects to the performance of WLAN system operating on dierent types of channels. Another simpler, but not less powerful, link adaptation method is proposed in [5]. The method is similar to the Auto-Rate Fallback (ARF) method used in Lucent's WaveLANII device [17]. The transmitter maintains two counters for each of its links, one for successful transmission and one for failed transmission. If a packet is transmitted successfully, the success counter is increased by one, and the failure counter is reset to zero. On the other hand, if the transmission fails, then the failure counter is incremented by one and the success counter is reset to zero. If the success counter is greater than a threshold value S , then the the transmitter will start the next transmission using the next (i.e. higher) data rate available. Similarly, if number of packet failed is greater than the threshold F , the transmission rate is decreased by one. All the counters are reset to zero after the transmission rate changed. The performance and eciency of this link adaptation method depends on the choices of S and F . The performance of several values of S have been studied in [5] using narrowband Rayleigh channel. However, this type of channel cannot represent the real
usage scenario of the WLAN in which the channel usually suers from frequency-selective fading.
1.2.2 Objectives of the project

In this project, we choose to investigate the link adaptation scheme proposed in [5]. This is a promising technique for lling in the link adaptation vacancy in the IEEE 802.11a standard. It is very simple to implement, and able to provide considerable gain in system throughput [5]. However, the performance of this scheme must be well-understood before it can be applied in practice. Under the title Link adaptation for IEEE 802.11a WLAN over fading channel , this project aims at two main objectives:
To analyse the performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer under realistic channel conditions. Most of the researches have assumed error-free or simple independent uniform bit errors in the channel for their 802.11a studies. These simple assumptions are not very realistic, since the WLAN connection often experiences timevarying frequency-selective fading, which makes its bit and packet error patterns more complicated. In this project, we develop an IEEE 802.11a simulator operating on frequency-selective channel models, which are abstracted from practical measurements. The average goodput, which is dened as the ratio between total number of information bits received at the destination and the total time needed for transmission, is the main parameter to be calculated and analysed in the simulation. Additional parameters, such as the mean transfer delay and collision probability are also obtained and discussed. To validate the performance of link adaptation method in [5] with realistic channel models. A simple Rayleigh at fading channel model is used in [5], which does not represent a practical scenario. In this project, the above-mentioned IEEE 802.11a simulator and frequency-selective fading channel models are employed to validate the performance of the proposed scheme. We also examine the eects of its parameters (S and F ), and discuss possible modications to the original scheme.
1.3 Summaries
This chapter serves as an introduction to our 9th semester project at Aalborg University. In this chapter, we have discussed the growth of WLAN, its advantages and disadvantages, together with short introduction of dierent WLAN standards.
1.3 Summaries
In this project, our focus is on the IEEE 802.11a, a promising candidate to be the unied international WLAN standard. Several mechanisms, which can help to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11a, are briey discussed in this chapter. The objectives of this project are: (a) To analyse the average goodput of the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer under realistic channel conditions, and (b) To validate the performance of link adaptation method proposed in [5]. To help unfamiliar readers understand our works, we are going to present some introduction of wireless channel, and IEEE 802.11 PHY and MAC layers in the following chapters.
Chapter
2
The wireless channel
The wireless channel is a medium that exists between two end points of any wireless communication system. It has great impact on the performance of the wireless communication system. The system designer often has no control on the choice of channel, and in most cases, the system design has to compensate for the channel impairment. It is very important for the system designer to be able to know most or some of the properties of the channel before design of the system begins. That can either be achieved with extensive channel measurements at the area where the link is deployed, or with channel models that can characterise these channels in some extents. In this section, we introduce channel models that are used throughout our project.
2.1 The AWGN channel

The most well-known and widely-used model in digital communications is the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, which is illustrated in Figure 2.1. The AWGN channel model is useful for verifying the performance of wireless communication systems: it approximates the performance of the wired channel and serves as the lower bound for the degradation by the radio channel [10].
Figure 2.1: The AWGN channel
In an AWGN channel, the transmitted signal r(t) gets disturbed by an additive white Gaussian noise process n(t) and the received signal s(t) is given in equation (2.1):
s(t) = r(t) + n(t)

11
(2.1)
12
Typical characteristics of the white Gaussian noise n(t) are: (a) Any two noise samples are statistically independent and its Auto-Correlation Function (ACF), Rn ( ), consists of a weighted delta function: N0 Rn ( ) = ( ) (2.2) 2 and (b) Its Power Spectral Density (PSD) is a constant over all frequency of interest.
Sn (f ) =
N0 2
(2.3)
The latter two characteristics are depicted in Figure 2.2 (a) and (b) respectively.
Figure 2.2: Characteristics of AWGN channel
Although the AWGN channel often serves as a reference channel model in wireless communication systems, it is not sucient to describe real characteristics of a wireless channel, such as shadowing or multi-path fading phenomenon. We will go through the main phenomena of the wireless channel in the next section.
2.2 Characterisation of wireless channel

To understand how radio channel can aect the operations of mobile communication systems, we need to understand its behaviours. These behaviours can be divided into three categories: path loss, large-scale fading and small-scale fading.
2.2.1 Path loss

The path loss is the signal attenuation caused by beam divergence, i.e. signal energy spreads over larger areas at increased distances from the source. If we consider a mobile communication system working in idealised free space, where there is no object that might absorb or reect RF energy and the atmosphere behaves as a perfectly uniform
2.2 Characterisation of wireless channel
13
and non-absorbing medium, the RF energy between the transmitter and the receiver reduces according to an inverse-square law with distance. When the received antenna is isotropic, the attenuation factor Lf s (d), sometimes referred to as free-space loss, can be expressed as [22]:
Pr (d) Lf s (d) = = Pt
4d
(2.4)
where Pt is the transmitted power, Pr (d) is the received power at distance d, and is the wavelength of the propagating signal. Instead of using the transmitted power as in equation (2.4), large-scale propagation models often use a close-in distance, d0 , as a known received power reference point to calculate the path loss. Then, the free-space path loss at any distance d, P Lf s (d), is given by:
P Lf s (d) =
Pr (d) = Pr (d0 )
d d0
(2.5)
In general, if the transmitter and the receiver are not in idealised free space, the path loss is usually increasing with nth power of the distance between them [21]:
P L(d)
d d0
(2.6)
where P L(d) is the path loss as a function of distance d, and n is environment-dependent path loss exponent which indicates the rate at which the path loss increases with distance. For instance, the Table 2.1 provides the measured path loss exponents for various environments.
Table 2.1: Path loss exponents for di erent environments [21]
Environment
Free space Urban area cellular radio Shadowed urban cellular radio In building Line Of Sight (LOS) Obstructed in building Obstructed in factories
Path Loss Exponent (n)

2.7 3 1.6 4 2 2 to to to to to 3.5 5 1.8 6 3
14
2.2.2 Large-scale fading

The large-scale fading is due to motion of the mobile receiver over large terrain obstacles (such as hills, buildings, etc.) between the transmitter and the receiver. The receiver is often represented as being shadowed by such obstacles, which causes the received signal power to drop for a period of time. Measurements have shown that at any value of distance d, the path loss P L(d) is random and log-normally distributed (i.e. normal in dB) about the mean distance-dependent value [21]:
log P L(d)
= log P L(d) + X
(2.7)
where X is a zero-mean Gaussian distributed random variable (in dB) with standard deviation (also in dB). The large-scale fading is also referred to as slow fading, as it varies slowly over time (over 20-30 wavelengths).
2.2.3 Small-scale fading

The small-scale fading phenomenon refers to the dramatic changes in signal amplitude and phase due to the combination of multi-path signals at the receiver. It is one of the key subjects in our project and deserves to be discussed separately in the next section.
2.3 Multi-path propagation and small-scale fading

Multi-path propagation occurs when a transmitted signal, which is diracted, reected and scattered from surfaces of obstacles, such as buildings, walls or trees, arrives at a receiver from dierent paths. These multi-path components, with random phases and amplitudes, combine vectorially at the receiver, causing amplitude and phase of received signal to uctuate. As the carrier wavelength used in Ultra High Frequency (UHF) mobile radio applications ranges from 15 to 60cm, a very small change (as small as a half-wavelength) in the spatial separation between receiver and transmitter can cause large change in the phases of multi-path components. As a result, the uctuation in received signal is much faster than in the case of large-scale fading. Hence, it is often referred to as small-scale fading or fast fading. The small-scale fading channel is often characterised by Clarke's 2D model. The model considers a xed transmitter communicating with a mobile receiver, both of which having vertically polarised antennas. In order to reduce complexity, Clarke's 2D model assumes that the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is suciently large, so that the radio propagation environment can be modelled in two dimensions, i.e. all incoming
15
waves travel in the azimuthal plane. This assumption has been proved to be practical, because many measurements observed in reality show similar Doppler spectrum shape as one predicted by Clarke [19]. Based on the above-mentioned assumption, the incident waves at the mobile receiver can also be seen as plane waves.
y
n th incoming wave
n v
x
Mobile
Figure 2.3: A typical plane wave incident on a MS receiver [11]
Figure 2.3 depicts a mobile receiver moving along the x-axis with velocity v . At any time, there are a number of incoming waves arriving at the receiver, with dierent delays and Angle of Arrival (AoA). Let's take a look at the nth incoming wave, which arrives at angle n . The Doppler shift, or frequency shift, fD,n associated with that incoming wave can be calculated as follows:
fD,n = fm cos n
[Hz]
(2.8)
v where fm = is the maximum Doppler frequency, which occurs when n = 0o , and is the wavelength of the incident waves.
The passband representation r(t) of the transmitted signal can be expressed as [23]:
r(t) = Re[(t)ej2fc t ] r
(2.9)
where Re[.] is the real part of the complex signal, r(t) is the complex envelope (or baseband representation) of the transmitted signal, and fc is the carrier frequency. At the receiver, the received signal associated with the nth incoming path is attenuated, delayed in time, and shifted in frequency due to Doppler phenomenon. From equations (2.8) and (2.9), such a signal is given as:
sn (t) = Re Cn (t)ej2(fc +fD,n )(tn (t)) r(t n (t))
(2.10)
16
where Cn (t) and n (t) are respectively the time-variant amplitude and the time delay associated with the nth propagation path. The received signal is the sum of dierent scattering paths, each possessing independent amplitude Cn (t), Doppler shift frequency fD,n and time delay n (t). Assuming that there is a nite number M of scattering paths, the passband representation of received signal can be expressed as [23]:
M M
s(t) =
n=1
sn (t) = Re
n=1 M
Cn (t)ej2(fc +fD,n )(tn (t)) r(t n (t))

(2.11)
= Re
n=1
Cn (t)ejn (t) r(t n (t))ej2fc t
in which:
n (t) = 2[(fc + fD,n )n (t) fD,n t]

is the phase associated with the nth incoming path.
(2.12)
From equation (2.11), it is obvious that the baseband representation of the received signal is given as follows:
M
s(t) =
n=1
Cn (t)ejn (t) r(t n (t))
(2.13)
Equation (2.13) shows that the noiseless multi-path channel can be modelled as a timevarying tapped delay line lter with the following impulse response:
M
h(t, ) =
n=1
gn (t)( n (t))
(2.14)
where (.) is Dirac delta function and gn (t) is the time-variant complex gain correspond th ing to the n scattering path of the channel and given as:
gn (t) = Cn (t)ejn (t)
(2.15)
If the channel is assumed to be time-invariant, or is at least Wide Sense Stationary (WSS) over a small-scale time or distance interval, the equation (2.14) is reduced to [21]:
M M
h( ) =
n=1
Cn e
jn
( n ) =
n=1
gn ( n )
(2.16)
17
2.3.1 Parameters of multi-path channel

In this section we will discuss several important parameters which grossly quantify the above-mentioned multi-path channel model. First of all, we can dene excess delay as the relative delay of the nth multi-path component as compared to the rst arriving component and is given as n : n = n 0 (2.17) where 0 is the delay of the rst arriving multi-path component. The Maximum excess delay is the largest excess delay experienced in the channel:
max = max(1 , 2 , . . . , M )
(2.18)
Secondly, we can dene the Power Delay Prole (PDP) as the magnitude squared of the channel impulse response:
M
P DP ( ) =| h( ) |2 =
n=1
| gn |2 ( n )
(2.19)
The PDP is an important parameter of the wireless channel, as it indicates the distribution of received power in delay domain. For convenient, P DP ( ) normally has its time origin redened so as to position the rst arriving multi-path component at = 0, and the function is then dened in terms of the excess delay variable , i.e [19]:
M
P DP () = P DP ( 0 ) =
n=1
| gn |2 ( n )
(2.20)
An example of the PDP is illustrated in Figure 2.4. Two statistical moments of P DP () of practical interest are the mean excess delay and the rms delay spread. The mean excess delay, , is the rst moment of the PDP and is dened to be [21]:
P DP (k )k k P DP (k )
(2.21)
The rms delay spread is the square root of the second central moment of the PDP and is dened to be [21]:
=
where:
2 ()2
k
(2.22) (2.23)
2 =
P DP (k )2 k P DP (k ) k
Equations (2.21) and (2.22) do not rely on the absolute power level of the PDP, but only the relative amplitudes of the multi-path components within the PDP. Typical values
18
Figure 2.4: Example of an indoor power delay pro le; rms delay spread, mean excess delay, maximum excess delay (at
10dB) and threshold level are shown [21]
of rms delay spread are on the order of microseconds in outdoor mobile radio channels and on the order of nanoseconds in indoor radio channels [21] Thirdly, we can calculate the spectral response (or magnitude frequency response) of the wireless channel as the Fourier transform of the PDP:
SP (f ) = FT P DP ()
(2.24)
where FT{.} denotes the Fourier transform function. The spectral response function shows the behaviour of the wireless channel in frequency domain. Analogous to the delay spread parameters in the time domain, coherence bandwidth is used to characterised the channel in frequency domain. Coherence bandwidth, Bc , is a statistical measure of the range of frequencies over which the channel can be considered at (i.e. a channel which passes all spectral components with approximately equal gain and linear phase). In other words, coherence bandwidth is the range of frequencies over which two frequency components have a strong potential for amplitude correlation. Two sinusoids with frequency separation greater than Bc are aected quite dierently by the channel. If the coherence bandwidth is dened as the bandwidth over which the frequency correlation function is above 0.5, then the coherence bandwidth is approximately [21]: 1 Bc (2.25) 5 It is important to note that an exact relationship between coherence bandwidth and rms delay spread does not exist, and equation (2.25) is only an estimate.
19
Although delay spread and coherence bandwidth describe the time dispersive nature of the small-scale fading channel, they do not oer information about the time-varying nature of such channel caused by relative motion between the transmitter and receiver. We need another set of parameters, Doppler spread and coherence time, to do the job. The Doppler spread, BD , is a measure of the spectral broadening caused by the time rate of change of the mobile radio channel and dened as the range of frequencies over which the received Doppler spectrum is essentially non-zero. If a pure sinusoidal signal of frequency fc is transmitted into the channel, the received signal spectrum, called Doppler spectrum, will have components in range of fc fd and fc + fd , where fd is the Doppler shift. The amount of spectral broadening depends on fd , which is a function of the velocity of the mobile receiver and the AoA (see Figure 2.3). The coherence time, Tc , is the time domain dual of the Doppler spread and it is used to characterise the time varying nature of the channel. In other words, it is a statistical measure of the time duration over which the channel impulse response is essentially invariant, and quanties the similarity of the channel response at dierent times. If the coherence time is dened as the time over which the time correlation function is above 0.5, then the coherence time is approximately [21]:
Tc
where fm is the maximum Doppler shift.
9 16fm
(2.26)
2.3.2 Slow vs. fast fading

Depending on how rapidly the transmitted signal changes compared to the rate of change of the channel, a small-scale fading channel can be classied as either fast fading or slow fading. In a fast fading channel, the channel coherence time, Tc , is less than symbol period, Ts . In other words, the channel behaviours change during one symbol duration. As the channel coherence time is inversely-proportional to the Doppler spread, BD , the fast fading channel often has high Doppler spread. In practice, fast fading only occurs in transmission links with very low data rate. On the other hand, a small-scale fading channel is referred to as slow fading if the channel impulse response remains constant during one or several symbol periods. It means that slow fading happens when the symbol period, Ts , is smaller than the channel coherence time, Tc ; or the Doppler spread is smaller than the bandwidth of the transmitted signal.
2.3.3 Flat vs frequency-selective fading

The small-scale fading channel can also be classied by its time-dispersiveness nature. A small-scale fading channel is referred to as at fading if its channel coherence bandwidth,
20
Bc , is much larger than the bandwidth of the transmitted signal, Bs . This means that all frequency components of the transmitted signal are undergone the same level of fading and thus the spectral characteristics of the transmitted signal are preserved at the receiver. For this reason, at fading channels are also known as narrow-band channel, since the bandwidth of the applied signal is narrow as compared to the channel at fading bandwidth.
SmallScale Fading (Based on multipath time delay spread)
Flat fading
Frequency Selective Fading
1. BW of signal < BW of channel 2. Delay spread < Symbol period
1. BW of signal > BW of channel 2. Delay spread > Symbol period
SmallScale Fading (Based on Doppler spread)
Fast fading
Slow fading
1. High Doppler spread 2. Coherence time < Symbol period 3. Channel variations faster than baseband signal variations
1. Low Doppler spread 2. Coherence time > Symbol period 3. Channel variations slower than baseband signal variations
Figure 2.5: Classi cations of small-scale fading channel [21]
In a at fading channel, the rms delay spread, , is much smaller than the symbol period, Ts . Under this assumption we can consider that the n in the equation (2.16), which represents the time delay for the nth scattering path from the transmitter to the receiver, is approximately equal to c for each n. Thus we can rewrite the equation (2.16) as follows:
M
h( ) = ( c )
n=1
Cn ejn
(2.27)
= g (t)( c )
where g (t) = M Cn ejn is the time-varying complex gain of the at fading channel. n=1 It is important to note that the impulse response of the at-fading channel is only one tap at c . Without loss of generality, we can assume the time delay c is zero, or there is no delay occurred between the transmitter and the receiver. This assumption is reasonable, because there are dierent synchronization techniques available to the receiver to compensate for that time delay. In addition, the eect of thermal noise and interference of the channel is modelled by adding AWGN channel n(t) to the received signal. As a result, the baseband representation of the received signal of a at fading

channel is given as:
21
s(t) = h(t) r(t) + n(t) = g (t)(t) + n(t) r

(2.28)
where denotes the convolution operation. The gure 2.6 illustrates the equivalent baseband representation of the at fading channel.
Figure 2.6: The baseband representation of at fading channel
[11], [19] and [21] provide very detailed analysis on the characteristics of the timevarying complex gain, g (t), of the at fading channel. In absence of a LOS or dominant scattering path, the phase of the complex gain is uniformly distributed and the envelope has Rayleigh distribution: r2 exp r22 r0 2 f (r) = (2.29) 0 otherwise
2 where is the short-term envelope of the complex gain and = power of the complex gain [21]. PM
n=1 2 Cn
is the mean
On the other hand, if there is a dominant stationary (or non-fading) signal component present at the receiver, such as LOS propagation path, the envelope of the complex gain has Ricean distribution: r2 exp r2 +A2 I Ar A 0 and r 0 2 0 2 f (r) = (2.30) 0 r<0 The parameter A denotes the peak amplitude of the dominant signal and I0 (.) is the modied Bessel function of the rst kind and zero order. For calculation convenient, the Ricean distribution is often described in terms of a parameter K, which is dened as [21]: A2 (2.31) K= 2 2
22
The Rayleigh and Ricean distributions are plotted against each other in Figure 2.7 for comparison. We can observe that if A 0, then K 0 and the Ricean degenerates to a Rayleigh distribution. The Figure 2.7 also shows that, for Rayleigh or Ricean fading with small value of factor K, the level and the possibility to have deep fades are higher than that of Ricean fading with large K, which results in degradation of wireless system performance.
Ricean and Rayleigh distributions of the fading envelope (with the same mean power 2 ) 1 Ricean distribution, K = 10 Ricean distribution, K = 1 Rayleigh distribution
0.9
0.8
0.7 Probability Density Function
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
3 4 5 Shortterm fading envelope
Figure 2.7: The Rayleigh and Ricean distributions
In contrast to the at fading channel, frequency-selective fading channel happens if the channel coherence bandwidth, Bc , is smaller than the bandwidth of the transmitted signal, Bs . Equivalently, the rms delay spread, , is greater than the symbol period, Ts , in frequency-selective fading channel. In this case, dierent frequency components of the transmitted signal are undergone dierent levels of fading, and the spectral characteristics of the transmitted signal are not preserved at the receiver. This causes distortion in the time-domain representation of the received signal, and the channel is said to induce Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI). As a result, the frequency-selective fading channel is far worse than the at fading channel in terms of performance. It is sometimes referred to as wide-band channel, because the bandwidth of the transmitted signal is relatively wider than the coherence bandwidth of the channel. The frequency-selective fading channel is much more dicult to model than the at fading channel and often it is established from measurements. From equation (2.16), we
2.4 Summaries
23
can derive the relationship between the transmitted and received signals in a frequencyselective fading channel as follows:
s(t) = h(t) r(t) + n(t)

M
=
n=1
gn (t)(t n ) + n(t) r
(2.32)
The equation (2.32) shows that the impulse response of the frequency-selective fading channel has multiple taps at dierent delays, and each of those can be seen as one atfading channel. As a result, the frequency-selective fading channel can be modelled as a combination of multiple at fading channels as illustrated in Figure 2.8.
Figure 2.8: The baseband representation of frequency-selective fading channel
High-speed wireless communication systems, such as WLAN, often encounter frequencyselective fading condition. Such condition induces ISI into the received signal and greatly degrades the performance of the systems. In the Appendix C we discuss in details the OFDM technique which can help to mitigate the negative eects of the frequencyselective fading channel.
2.4 Summaries
In this chapter, we have characterized the most common propagation phenomena that occurred in the wireless medium. The wireless channel is often more hostile than its wired counterpart, and its behaviour is often dicult to predict. In order to analyse the capabilities of wireless communications system to cope with channel impairements, system designers often use some kind of channel models.
24
This chapter introduces three commonly-used channel models, namely AWGN, at fading (or narrow-band) and frequency-selective fading (or wideband) channels. The AWGN channel approximates the performance of the wired channel and serves as the lower bound for the degradation by the wireless channel. The at fading channel happens when the channel coherence bandwidth is much larger than the bandwidth of the transmitted signal. The at fading channel can cause severe fades in received signal, which considerably degrades the system performance compared to AWGN channel. On the other hand, the frequency-selective fading channel occurs if the channel coherence bandwidth is smaller than the bandwidth of the transmitted signal. This is the worst type of channel models, because it induces ISI in the received signal. The frequencyselective fading channel is more dicult to model than at fading channel and often established from measurements. We will introduce several specic frequency-selective channel models in chapter 4.
Chapter
The IEEE 802.11a PHY and MAC layers

3.1 Description of the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer
The IEEE 802.11a PHY layer acts as a bridge between the MAC layer and the wireless medium. Thus, it was designed to support two main functions, as follows:
It denes the mechanism for transmitting and receiving data frames through a wireless medium between two or more Station (STA)s. When the IEEE 802.11 working group began evaluating proposals for the 802.11a, they adopted a joint proposal from NTT and Lucent that recommended OFDM as the baseline technology for the Physical Medium Dependent (PMD) system of the 5GHz WLAN. The OFDM technique was chosen because of its superior performance in combating frequency selective fading (Refer to Appendix C for more information). It provides convergence function, which adapts the capabilities of the PMD system to the PHY services. This function is supported by the Physical Layer Convergence Procedure (PLCP), which denes a method of mapping the IEEE 802.11 PHY Sublayer Service Data Unit (PSDU) into a framing format suitable for sending and receiving user data and management information between two or more STA using the associated PMD system.
Details about the PHY functions as well as PHY services can be obtained in [2]. In this section, we are going to present only aspects of the IEEE 802.11a PHY that are relevant to our project.
3.1.1 802.11a PHY framing format

The 802.11a PLCP transforms each data frame received from the MAC layer into a PLCP Protocol Data Unit (PPDU). As illustrated in Figure 3.1, the PPDU is divided into 3 main parts:
PLCP PREAMBLE This part consists of 12 symbols and enables the receiver to acquire timing and frequency synchronization and to estimate the channel response.
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Figure 3.1: Format of the 802.11a PHY frame [2]
SIGNAL This part is always sent at the lowest rate, which is 6Mbps. It is encoded with convolutional coder at rate of R = 1/2, and subsequently mapped onto a single Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK)-modulated OFDM symbol. It contains the following elds:
Rate This eld identies the data rate used at the DATA part, and is
required to decode this part.
Reserved This eld is reserved for future usage, and is currently set to
0.
Length This eld represents the number of octets in the PSDU that the
MAC is currently requesting the PHY to transmit.
Parity Based on the values of Rate, Reserved and Length elds, this
eld contains a single-bit value that provides even parity.
Tail This eld is always set to 0 to return the convolutional encoder
to zero state.
DATA This part can be sent at dierent data rates, which is indicated by the Rate eld. It consists of the following elds:
Service This eld consists of rst seven bits as 0, to synchronize the
descrambler in the receiver and another nine bits (currently all 0) reserved for future usage.
PSDU This part represents the contents of the PPDU, or the actual
MAC frame being sent.
Tail This eld consists of six bits (all 0) to return the convolutional
encoder to zero state.
Pad bits This eld contains number of bits in order to make the frame
size equal to a specic multiple of coded bits in an OFDM symbols.
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3.1.2 Implementation of IEEE 802.11 PHY

A simplied block diagram of the transmitter and receiver for the OFDM-based 802.11a PHY is shown in Figure 3.2. In this section, each block of the diagram is discussed in details.
Figure 3.2: Simpli ed block diagram for the 802.11a transmitter and receiver
Scrambler / Descrambler
According to the standard, the DATA portion is scrambled using a frame synchronuous 127 bits sequence generator. Scrambling is used to randomize the Service, PSDU and pad bits, which might contain long strings of 0 and/or 1. The Tail bits are not scrambled. The frame synchronous scrambler uses the generator polynomial S(x) as follows: S(x) = x7 + x4 + 1 (3.1) The same scrambler is used to scramble transmitted data and to descramble received data. When a STA is transmitting, the initial state of the IEEE 802.11a scrambler will be set to a pseudo random non-zero state. The rst seven bits of the Service eld will be set to a zeros prior to scrambling to enable estimation of the initial state of the scrambler at the receiver. The content of the SIGNAL part of the 802.11a frame is not scrambled.
Convolutional coder and Viterbi decoder

To protect the transmitted frames from channel errors, FEC scheme is implemented in IEEE 802.11a using the convolutional encoder of rate R = 1/2. The encoder uses industrial-standard generator polynomials, g0 = 1338 and g1 = 1718 (or equivalently 0010110112 and 0011110012 in binary format). These generator polynomials dene the connections for the output bit A and B, respectively, as shown in Figure 3.3. The bit denoted as A is output from the encoder before the bit denoted as B. The number of shift register elements determines how large a coding gain the convolutional code can achieve. The longer the shift register, the more powerful the code is. However, the decoding complexity of the maximum likelihood Viterbi algorithm grows
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Figure 3.3: The block diagram of the convolutional encoder used in IEEE 802.11a [2]
Figure 3.4: The puncturing patterns used in IEEE 802.11a: (a) for 3/4 rate, and (b) for 2/3 rate convolutional code [2]
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exponentially with the number of shift register elements. This limits the currently used convolutional codes to maximum eight shift register elements, and IEEE 802.11a uses only six, due to its very high speed data rate [9]. In IEEE 802.11a specications, additional rates of 2/3 and 3/4 can be achieved by means of puncturing the half rate convolutional code. The basic idea behind puncturing is not to transmit some of the bits output by the standard convolutional encoder, thus increasing the rate of the code. For example, increasing the 1/2 rate to 3/4 is done by deleting two of every six bits at the output of the encoder. The bits that are not transmitted are dened by a puncturing pattern. Figure 3.4 illustrates the puncturing patterns for obtaining the 2/3 and 3/4 rate convolutional code. Before the punctured code can be decoded, the receiver has to insert dummy zero bits into the location that were punctured in the transmitter. The maximum likelihood Viterbi algorithm is used to decode the received data. This algorithm can be implemented with either hard or soft decision demapping module (see section 3.1.2). Nevertheless, the soft decision is recommended method to use with Viterbi decoding because it provides better performance compared to that of the hard decision, and this gain in performance does not cost any communications resources [9].
Interleaving / deinterleaving modules

In a frequency selective fading channel, the OFDM subcarriers generally have dierent amplitudes. However, the deep fades in the frequency spectrum may cause groups of subcarriers to be less reliable than others, thereby causing bit errors to occur in bursts rather than being randomly scattered. Most of FEC codes are not designed to deal with error bursts. As a result, interleaving is usually employed to randomize the bursty channel errors, so that the FEC codes could be more eective. According to the IEEE 802.11a specications, all encoded data bits shall be interleaved by a block interleaver with a block size corresponding to the number of bits in a single OFDM symbol (NCBP S ). The interleaver is dened by a two-step permutation: the rst permutation ensures that adjacent coded bits are mapped onto nonadjacent subcarriers; the second ensures that adjacent coded bits are mapped alternately onto less and more signicant bits of the constellation and, thereby, the probability to have contiguous stream of error bits is decreased [2]. If we denote by k the index of the coded bit before the rst permutation, i and j are the indexes of the rst and the second permutation, respectively, then the rst permutation is dened by the following rule:
i=
NCBP S mod(k, 16) k + oor( ) 16 16
k = 0, 1, . . . , NCBP S 1
(3.2)
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where mod(x, y) denotes modulus after division of x and y , and oor(.) denotes the largest integer not exceeding the parameter. The second permutation is dened by the rule:
i 16 i j = s oor( ) + mod(i + NCBP S oor( ), s) s NCBP S
i = 0, 1, . . . , NCBP S 1 (3.3)
where s is determined by the number of coded bits per subcarrier, NBP SC , according to:
NBP SC , 1) 2 where max(x, y) denotes the maximum value between two values, x and y . s = max(
(3.4)
The deinterleaver, which performs the inverse operation, is also dened by two permutations. Here we denote by j the index of the original received bit before the rst permutation, i is the index after the rst and before the second permutation, and k is the index after the second permutation, just prior to delivering the coded bits to the Viterbi decoder. The rst deinterleaving permutation is dened by the rule:
j 16 j i = s oor( ) + mod(j + oor( ), s) s NCBP S
j = 0, 1, . . . , NCBP S 1
(3.5)
This permutation is inverse of the permutation described in Equation 3.3. The second permutation is dened as:
k = 16 i (NCBP S 1) oor(
16 i ) NCBP S
i = 0, 1, . . . , NCBP S 1
(3.6)
This block interleaving/deinterleaving mechanism is simple to implement using the random access memory (RAM). It is also fast and therefore introduces minimum delay in the transmission link.
Modulation mapping / demapping modules

Pursuant to the IEEE 802.11a, the OFDM subcarriers can be modulated by one of four dierent modulation formats, namely BPSK, Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), 16-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and 64-QAM. These formats are used in combination with three coding rates to achieve data rates of 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48 and 54Mbps (See Table 3.1). At the transmitter, the encoded and interleaved bit stream is converted into corresponding symbols stream via the symbol mapping module. The input bit stream is divided into groups of NBP SC (equal to 1, 2, 4 or 6) bits and converted into complex number (I + jQ) representing the BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM or 64-QAM constellation points. The conversion is performed according to Gray-coded constellation mapping schemes, illustrated in Figure 3.5, with the input bit, b0 , being the earliest in the stream.
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Figure 3.5: The constellations of BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM de ned in IEEE 802.11a standard [2]
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Table 3.1: Rate-dependent parameter [2] Coded Modulation Coding rate bits per (R ) subcarrier (NBP SC )
Rate Index
Data rate (Mbps)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
BPSK BPSK QPSK QPSK 16QAM 16QAM 64QAM 64QAM
1/2 3/4 1/2 3/4 1/2 3/4 2/3 3/4
1 1 2 2 4 4 6 6
Coded bits per OFDM symbol (NCBP S ) 48 48 96 96 192 192 288 288
Data bits per OFDM symbol (NDBP S ) 24 36 48 72 96 144 192 216
To achieve the same average power for all mappings, the output complex values, d, are formed by multiplying the resulting (I + jQ) value by a normalization factor, KM OD .
d = KM OD (I + jQ)
(3.7)
For dierent modulation schemes, the values of normalization factor can be found in Table 3.2.
Table 3.2: Modulation-dependent normalization factor KM OD [2] Modulation KM OD BPSK 1 QPSK 1/ 2 16-QAM 1/ 10 64-QAM 1/ 43
At the receiver, the job of symbol demapping module is to decide what was actually received. The decisions are divided into hard and soft decisions, depending on how much information about each transmitted bit is produced. A hard decision demapping module makes a denite determination of whether a bit 0 or 1 was transmitted, thus the output of the demapping module are 0s and 1s. On the other hand, the soft decision demapping module outputs 'soft' bits, i.e. it provides the information about the reliability of its decision in addition to a bit 0 or 1. This additional information can greatly improve the performance of the Viterbi decoder [9].
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IFFT / FFT modules

The OFDM modulation is performed by Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) algorithm (see Appendix C for more information). In Figure 3.2, the output of symbol mapping module is divided into NSD parallel streams by the means of the Serial to Parallel (S/P) converter, and transformed into time-domain by IFFT module. The Parallel to Serial (P/S) converter combines the parallel signals into OFDM symbols.
Table 3.3: Timing-related parameters in IEEE 802.11a PHY layer [2]
Parameter Description
NSD NSP NST F TF F T TP REAM BLE TSIGN AL TGI TGI2 TSY M TSHORT TLON G
Value
Number of data subcarriers Number of pilot subcarriers Number of subcarriers, total Subcarrier frequency spacing IFFT/FFT period PLCP preamble duration Duration of the SIGNAL BPSK OFDM symbol GI duration Training symbol GI duration Symbol interval Short training sequence duration Long training sequence duration
48 4 52 (NSD + NSP ) 0.3125MHz (=20MHz/64) 3.2s (1/F ) 16s (TSHORT + TLON G ) 4.0s (TGI + TF F T ) 0.8s (TF F T /4) 1.6s (TF F T /2) 4s (TGI + TF F T ) 8s (10 TF F T /4) 8s (TGI2 + 2 TF F T )
Table 3.3 lists all timing-related parameters of the IEEE 802.11a. The total number of subcarriers in one OFDM symbol is 52, in which 48 subcarriers are for transmitting data, and other 4 are used for pilot signals. These subcarriers are numbered from -26 to 26, and the 0th subcarrier, which is falling at Direct Current (DC), is not used to avoid diculties in Digital to Analog (D/A) and Analog to Digital (A/D) converter osets and carrier feedthrough in the RF system. The pilot subcarriers are put in subcarriers -21, -7, 7 and 21 of each OFDM symbol, aimed at making the coherent detection robust against frequency osets and phase noise. The subcarrier frequency spacing is 0.3125MHz, which makes the IFFT duration 3.2s. At the receiver, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm is applied to reverse the transmitter operation and obtain the transmitted symbol stream, which is delivered to symbol demapping module to recover the binary data.
Guard Interval insertion and windowing

To protect the OFDM symbol from ISI and Inter-Channel Interference (ICI) and to reduce the transmitted spectrum, the Guard Interval (GI) insertion and windowing
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operations are performed after IFFT (Refer to Appendix C for more information). In IEEE 802.11a, the guard interval is 800ns long, which can accommodate root mean square (rms) delay spread up to 250ns [24]. At the receiver, the GI removal module will remove the guard period prior to FFT operation.
IQ modulator / demodulator
The main task of the IQ modulator is to modulate the complex-value OFDM symbols onto carrier frequency at 5GHz range before broadcasted into the channel. At the receiver, the IQ demodulator is used to down-convert the OFDM symbols back to baseband for further decoding.
3.2 Description of IEEE 802.11 MAC layer

The IEEE 802.11 standard species a common MAC layer, which supports the seamless operation between higher layer, e.g. Logical Link Control (LLC) layer, and dierent WLAN PHY layers, such as 802.11a OFDM-based PHY. Often referred to as the brain of the WLAN, 802.11 MAC layer provides the following primary functions:
Scanning: Before transmitting data, a WLAN STA must at least know if there is any AP (or other STAs, in ad-hoc mode) around whom it can talk to. Scanning function is to enable the STA search for all APs (or STAs) in its neighbourhood. Authentication: This is the process of proving identity, to make sure that a STA is authorized to access the services provided by an AP (or other STAs). Association: Once authenticated, the STA must associate with the AP (or other STAs) before sending any data frame. Association is necessary to synchronize the mobile STA and AP with important information, such as supported data rates. Privacy: This function is used to prevent the content of data frames from being read by other than the intended recipients. The IEEE 802.11 standard provides the optional WEP as encryption method to protect the information from eavesdroppers. Control of Medium Access: Since more than one STAs can share the medium (i.e. the wireless channel), the MAC layer is responsible for setting rules for the orderly access to the medium.
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Fragmentation: The optional fragmentation function enables 802.11 STA to divide a large data packet into smaller frames to transmit. Smaller frames mean smaller probability of bit errors, and thus higher chance that the receiver will receive these frames correctly. Besides, fragmentation is done to avoid having to retransmit the whole large packet in the presence of RF interference. Synchronization: Timing dierence between STAs can cause collisions in WLAN even though each node is following the access protocol. Thus, it is necessary for a STA to keep its timing as close to the timing of AP (or other STAs) as possible. This is supported by the timing synchronization function in MAC layer. Power Management: The optional power save mode allows a STA to turn o periodically when there is no need to send data. This function aims at conserving battery power of the mobile STA.
Interested readers can nd the complete reference for the IEEE 802.11 standard in [3]. In this section, we are going to discuss only features of the MAC layer that are necessary for our project.
3.2.1 802.11 MAC framing formats

The IEEE 802.11 species various frame types needed for operation of the MAC protocol. However, there are only four types of frame that are relevant to our project, namely data, Acknowledgement (ACK), Request-To-Send (RTS) and Clear-To-Send (CTS) frames. The formats of these frames are discussed briey here.
Data frame
Figure 3.6 shows the format of a data frame. It consists of the following elds:
MAC header A data frame begins with MAC header, which comprises frame control, duration, addresses, and sequence control information. The MAC header has xed size of 30 bytes. Frame body This is the payload of the data frame, which has variable length, from 0 to 2312 bytes. FCS The Frame Check Sequence (FCS) eld is 4bytes in length, which is used to provide integrity checking on the data frame. It contains the result of applying the CCITT CRC-32 polynomial to the MAC header and frame body [3].
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ACK, CTS and RTS frames

The formats of ACK, RTS and CTS are dened as in Figure 3.6. The ACK frame is used to acknowledge that the data frame was received successfully. It contains only a MAC header and a FCS, and its total length is 14 bytes. The RTS frame is used to make a transmission request from the source STA to the destination STA. It comprises of a MAC header and a FCS, with total length of 20 bytes. If the destination STA is ready to receive data, it will response by a CTS frame. The format of the CTS frame is essentially the same as the ACK frame. We will discuss the RTS/CTS mechanism in details later.
Figure 3.6: The MAC frame formats [3]: (a) Data frame, (b) ACK and CTS frame, and (c) RTS frame
3.2.2 Distributed Coordination Function

The IEEE 802.11 MAC species two dierent medium access control mechanisms between compatible STAs: The contention-based Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and the optional polling-based Point Coordination Function (PCF). The PCF is built on top of the DCF (as shown in Figure 3.7), and is used only on infrastructure networks. At present, only mandatory DCF is implemented in the 802.11-compliant products. In this project, the DCF is the main subject under study. The DCF achieves automatic medium sharing between STAs through the usage of Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). Before a STA starts transmission, it senses the wireless medium for some period of time to determine if any other STA is transmitting. If medium appears to be idle during the period, the
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Figure 3.7: MAC architecture [3]
transmission may proceed, else the STA has to defer until the end of the in-progress transmission. After deferral, or prior to attempting to transmit again immediately after a successful transmission, the STA must select a random backo interval and wait until the backo clock reaches zero before transmitting. The transmission can start only if the medium is still idle at the end of backo interval. The CSMA/CA is both equitable and suitable for a wireless network where collision detection is not feasible [9]. In the following sections, we are going to explain those techniques employed in the 802.11 CSMA/CA mechanism in detail.
Carrier sensing mechanisms

The DCF regulates that an 802.11 STA must perform both physical and virtual carrier sensing mechanisms. The physical mechanism is to listen to the medium and to detect a carrier (i.e. transmission activity) on the medium. The virtual mechanism is based on the Network Allocation Vector (NAV), which always has the latest information possible on scheduled transmission on the medium. The NAV acts as a backup mechanism to avoid collision. If a carrier is not sensed by physical means (for example, due to shadowing eects), the NAV can hopefully provide correct information on the medium activities. Thus, the STA should not attempt to transmit data until both physical and virtual carrier sense mechanisms concur on the medium being idle. More information about setting/resetting the NAV will be presented later in section about the RTS/CTS access method.
Inter-Frame Spacing
The CSMA/CA mechanism requires a specied gap between contiguous frame transmissions. The gap between frames is called Inter-Frame Spacing (IFS). A STA must ensure that the medium has been idle for the specied IFS before attempting to transmit. The IEEE 802.11 denes four IFSs to provide dierent priorities for access to the wireless medium. They are listed here in the order from the shortest to the longest one:
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EIFS DIFS PIFS SIFS LAST FRAME NEXT FRAME
Figure 3.8: The IEEE 802.11 Inter-Frame Spacings
Short Inter-Frame Spacing (SIFS) This is the shortest of the IFSs. It is used when two STAs have seized the medium and need to keep it for the duration of the frame exchange sequence to be performed. Using the smallest gap between their transmission, these STAs can prevent other STAs, which are required to wait for the medium to be idle for a longer gap, from attempting to use the medium, thus giving the priority to completion of the frame exchange sequence in progress. For example, the SIFS is used between a data frame and the corresponding ACK. PCF Inter-Frame Spacing (PIFS) This IFS is used only in STAs operating under the PCF to gain priority access to the medium. A STA using the PCF is allowed to transmit contention-free trac after its carrier sense mechanism determining that the medium is idle for a PIFS. DCF Inter-Frame Spacing (DIFS) The DIFS is used by STAs operating under the DCF to transmit data frames. The STA under DCF is allowed to transmit after its carrier-sense mechanisms determining that the medium is idle for a DIFS plus additional backo time after a correctly received frame. If an incorrect frame is received, the EIFS is used instead of DIFS. Extended Inter-Frame Spacing (EIFS) This IFS is used by STAs operating under DCF whenever the PHY layer indicates to the MAC layer that a frame transmission was begun but did not result in the correct reception of a complete MAC frame with correct FCS value. The EIFS is dened to provide enough time for another STA to acknowledge what was, to this STA, an incorrectly received frame before this STA commences transmission. The Figure 3.8 shows that if the last frame is not correctly received, the STA has to wait for an EIFS, plus additional backo time, before sending the next frame.
Backo procedure
The backo interval in the DCF is often referred to as collision avoidance mechanism, which aims at reducing the collision probability between multiple STAs accessing the medium. The highest probability of collision exists when the medium becomes idle
39
following a busy condition. That happens because multiple STAs could have been waiting for the medium to become available again to transmit. Having a random backo interval for each STA could prevent multiple STAs from accessing the STA at the same time. Additional method to further minimise collisions is to use RTS/CTS access mode, which is discussed later in this section. The backo mechanism is invoked for a STA
Figure 3.9: The random backo mechanism
in two cases: (a) When the STA attempts to transmit but nding the medium busy as indicated by either the physical or virtual carrier-sense mechanisms; and (b) After nishing transmission of a frame (which can be either successful or failed). An example of backo time mechanism is illustrated in Figure 3.9. To begin the backo procedure, a STA sets its backo timer to a random backo time using the following equation: Backof f T ime = Random() aSlotT ime (3.8) where Random() is a pseudo-random integer drawn from a uniform distribution over the interval [0, CW ]. The CW is referred to as contention window, and it is an integer within the range of aCW min and aCW max. aSlotT ime is the slot-time value depending on the characteristics of the PHY layer. If the medium is found to be inactive for a DCF Inter-Frame Spacing (DIFS) or Extended Inter-Frame Spacing (EIFS), as appropriate, the STA starts to decrease its backo timer. The carrier-sense mechanism is used to determine whether there is channel activity during each backo slot. If no medium activity is indicated for the duration of a particular backo slot, then the backo procedure shall decrement its backo time by aSlotT ime. The count-down is suspended if activity is detected on the medium, i.e. the backo timer shall not decrement for that slot. In this case, the STA must wait until the channel is determined to be idle for a DIFS period or EIFS, before resuming its backo procedure. Only when the backo timer reaches zero, the STA can start its transmission.
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Figure 3.10: The exponential increase of contention window
The backo procedure is dictated by a binary exponential backo algorithm, which aims at reducing the collision probability. In this algorithm, if the last attempt to transmit fails, the STA will assume that a collision has happened due to too many STAs accessing the medium at the same time. The STA will double its contention window, CW , to avoid collision in the next transmission. Figure 3.10 illustrates the binary exponential backo mechanism: The initial attempt always takes CW equal to aCW min to transmit the packet. Then, the CW shall take the next value in the series every time there is an unsuccessful attempt to transmit that frame, until it reaches the value of aCW max [3]. The STA resets its CW to aCW min when it receives the acknowledgement for the transmitted data frame. For the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer, the CW value is given as follows: CW = 2k 1 4 k 10 (3.9) Table 3.4 shows important timing-related parameters for IEEE 802.11a MAC layer. In this table, the ACKtime is the time required to send an ACK frame at the lowest mandatory rate (i.e. 6Mbps). The aAirP ropagationT ime is the anticipated time it takes a transmitted signal to go from the transmitting STA to the receiving STA. In addition, the aM ACP rocessingT ime is the nominal time that the MAC uses to process a frame and prepare a response to the frame [3].
Basic access method

In the IEEE 802.11 standard, the DCF provides two dierent access mechanisms: Basic access method and RTS/CTS access method. In the basic access mode, a source STA starts to transmit the data frame directly after a DIFS or EIFS plus an additional backo time (as shown in Figure 3.11). Upon

Table 3.4: Timing-related parameters in IEEE 802.11a MAC layer
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Parameter
Value
aSlotT ime aAirP ropagationT ime aM ACP rocessingT ime ACKtime SIF S P IF S DIF S EIF S aCW min aCW max
9 s << 1s < 2s 76s 16s 25s (SIF S + aSlotT ime) 34s (SIF S + 2 aSlotT ime) 126s (SIF S + ACKtime + DIF S ) 15 1023
successfully decoding the data frame, the destination STA replies with an ACK to acknowledge that the data frame has been received correctly. The Short Inter-Frame Spacing (SIFS) is the time interval between reception of data frame and transmission of the corresponding ACK frame. If the data frame is not received correctly by the destination, no ACK frame is transmitted to the source, and the source will have to retransmit the data frame after an ACK timeout.
Figure 3.11: The Basic Access Method
The basic access mode is simple to implement and requires minimum overhead information for each data frame transmission. This provides good performance in the case of no or very few collisions happening in the network. However, if the collisions are more likely to happen, the performance of basic access mode is quickly degraded, due to the fact that collided data frames must be retransmitted.
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RTS/CTS access method

The second access mechanism specied in DCF, the RTS/CTS access method, aims at reducing the collision probability and the impact of collision on system performance. Figure 3.12 illustrates the procedure of RTS/CTS access mechanism: before sending the data frame, the source STA starts by launching an RTS frame to the destination. The size of RTS frame is often much smaller than that of the data frame, and therefore less time is required if it needs to be retransmitted due to collision or channel error. Upon successfully receiving the RTS frame, the destination STA shall reply with a CTS frame to announce that it is ready for receiving the data frame, provided that its NAV shows that the medium is idle. In other words, if the virtual carrier-sensing mechanism at the destination STA indicates the medium is not idle, that STA shall not respond to the RTS frame. Only after the completion of exchanging RTS and CTS frame sequence, the data frame and its corresponding ACK are carried out. As a result, this method is sometimes referred to as handshaking access method.
Figure 3.12: The RTS/CTS Access Mode
In combination with the virtual carrier sensing mechanism, the RTS/CTS access scheme is particularly eective against hidden terminal problem. Hidden terminal problem happens when two or more STAs want to talk to the third STA, but both senders are not in the range of the other. For example, in Figure 3.13, the STA A is sending data to STA B , and STA C is the hidden with respect to STA A. Because C is out-of-range, it could not sense the transmission from A, and therefore it could start transmitting its owned data to B and would cause collision at B . The hidden terminal problem can be avoided, if the STAs in the above example can exchange information about how long the channel is reserved for transmission between any two STAs. This is done in the virtual carrier sensing mechanism of IEEE 802.11 standard: A sets the duration eld in the RTS frame to B equal to the time needed to send the CTS, data, ACK frames plus three SIFS in micro-second. Likewise, B sets the duration eld in the replied CTS frame equal to the duration eld of received RTS
3.3 Summaries
43
frame, minus one SIFS and CTS frame duration. Any STA, which is not the source or destination, shall update its NAV according to the duration eld contained in the most recent and valid RTS or CTS. Then, these STAs start to count-down their NAV, and do not transmit until the NAV is counted to be zero. As a result, C , which can listen to the CTS frame from B , will defer its transmission until A and B nish their conversation (see Figure 3.13).
Figure 3.13: Hidden terminal problem and RTS/CTS access method
In the above-mentioned example, it is possible that the A does not receive the CTS frame from B due to channel impairment, and therefore it does not continue to send the data frame to B . In this case, C might have to wait a long time before being able to transmit again, while the channel has become idle. To avoid such an inecient usage of medium, the IEEE 802.11 standard permits STA to reset its NAV if the channel is idle for a duration of:
N AV timeout = 2 SIF S + CT Stime + 2 aSlotT ime
(3.10)
The CT Stime is calculated using the length of CTS frame and the data rate at which the RTS frame used for the most recent NAV update was received [3]. The disadvantage of RTS/CTS mechanism is the considerable overhead information required in each transmission. Therefore, it is inecient to use this access scheme for relatively short data frames. In IEEE 802.11, the use of RTS/CTS mechanism depends on the dot11RT ST hreshold attribute. This attribute may be set on a per-STA basis, which allows STAs to be congured to use RTS/CTS either always, never or only on frames longer than a specied length.
3.3 Summaries
This chapter provides the overview of the PHY and MAC layers of the IEEE 802.11 specications, which is necessary in the next sections of the report.
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The IEEE 802.11a PHY layer denes the mechanism for high-speed data transmission through wireless medium. With combination of dierent modulation schemes and punctured convolutional codes, the PHY provides eight dierent data rates, from 6 to 54Mbps. This opens the possibility for using link adaptation techniques. The IEEE 802.11 species a common MAC layer, which connects dierent WLAN PHY layers to higher layer. The MAC layer provides various functions, but the most important one is to control the medium access for two or more WLAN STAs. The mandatory medium access control mechanism is DCF, which achieves automatic medium sharing between STAs through the usage of CSMA/CA. It provides two dierent access schemes, namely basic access method and RTS/CTS access method. The RTS/CTS access method requires more overhead information than that of basic access method, but it can help to minimise the impact of collisions and to reduce the number of collision due to hidden terminals.
Chapter
4
Implementation and result analysis
4.1 The implementation of IEEE 802.11a simulator
In this project, we have developed a Matlab simulator to analyse the performance of IEEE 802.11a standard under realistic multi-path channel models. The simulator can be divided into two separate components, namely the PHY layer and the MAC layer simulator.
4.1.1 The PHY layer simulator

The PHY layer simulator aims at providing the performance of the OFDM-based 802.11a PHY layer under practical frequency-selective fading environment. Based on this information, the MAC simulator, which we will discuss in the next section, is able to decide if a packet is corrupted by channel impairment or not. Figure 4.1 is the block diagram of our PHY simulator. First, the random generator is used to create a binary sequence with specic length (e.g. 1000 bytes) in Non-Return Zero (NRZ) format, which serves as one input data packet for the system. This data packet is encoded by passing through the convolutional coding module. The 1/2 rate convolutional coder is identical to that of the IEEE 802.11a standard, which we have described in section 3.1.2. The convolutional coding module is equipped with puncturing capability to create 2/3 or 3/4 rate codes. The output of the convolutional coder is interleaved, using the block-interleaving scheme dened by the IEEE 802.11a standard. The encoded and interleaved binary sequence is then mapped onto either BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM or 64-QAM symbols, depending on the targeted data rate. The outputed symbol stream is converted into NSD parallel streams by the S/P converter, where NSD is the number of data subcarriers per OFDM symbol. Finally, the IFFT operation is applied onto the parallel symbol streams for completing the OFDM modulation process. The wideband channel and AWGN channel module represents the eects of wireless channel on the performance of the IEEE 802.11a link. The wideband channel module introduces the channel fading, while the AWGN channel module adds the additive white Gaussian noise to the transmitted signal. 45
46
Figure 4.1: The block diagram of PHY layer simulator
At the receiver, the time-domain received signal is again converted to NSD parallel streams before coming into the FFT module. The FFT operation is employed to invert the signal back to symbol streams. The symbol streams are combined into single stream by the P/S converter. The symbol demapping and deinterleaving modules perform the inverse operations of the symbol mapping and interleaving modules at the transmitter, and return the binary stream to the Viterbi decoder. In our simulator, a hard-decision Viterbi algorithm is used to decode the received binary data. The number of both uncoded and coded bit errors are recorded during simulation at uncoded bit error counter and coded bit error counter modules. Only when the number of uncoded (or coded) bit errors is zero, the uncoded (or coded) packet is considered to be received successfully at the receiver. The above-mentioned processes are repeated for number of times, which is referred to as the number of packets sent in simulation, N packets. As a result, we are able to calculate both of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Packet Error Rate (PER), with and without convolutional coding in our simulation. In the PHY layer simulator, we follow few assumptions to simplify the simulation. First, we assume that the binary sequence outputed from the random generator has equal probabilities of -1 and 1, and there is no long run of either -1 or 1. Thus, the scrambler and descrambler required in IEEE 802.11a can be omitted in our simulation. Secondly, we assume that the timing and frequency are perfectly synchronised between the transmitting and receiving STA, and there is no degradation in system performance
47
due to timing error, frequency oset or phase noise. This is an optimistic assumption, because these problems often severely bring down the performance of OFDM-based system, unless proper synchronization techniques are employed. Thirdly, we assume that the channel estimation at the receiver is perfectly done, i.e. the receiver has complete information of the channel impulse response at each data subcarrier, in both amplitude and phase. As a result, the receiver is able to compensate for channel fading and phase change at each data subcarrier. Again, this assumption is idealistic because perfect channel estimation can never be achieved in practice.
4.1.2 The MAC layer simulator

The MAC layer simulator is the one of the main objects in our project. It aims at providing an accurate measure of the IEEE 802.11 MAC performance, based on PHY simulator information. The MAC simulator is an event-based simulation, and its operation can be best described by the state-machine diagrams in Figure 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4.
TRANSMITTING DATA Channel free & CTS received successfully
RESPONSE WITH CTS Channel free & RTS received successfully
Channel busy SENSING Channel free & The frame cannot be decoded or the ACK is received successfully RECEIVING UPDATE Channel free & NAV Frame received correctly It is not for the receiving STA
Channel free & DATA received successfully
RESPONSE WITH ACK
Figure 4.2: The state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a station in passive mode
Figure 4.2 shows the state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a STA in passive mode. The passive mode is dened as when the STA is sensing the medium or receiving packets
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Packet arrives
IDLE ACK received successfully and no other packets to transmit
READY
Channel free
ACK timeout or ACK received successfully and there is another packet to transmit
The channel becomes busy during a wait period WAIT TO TRANSMIT
WAIT FOR ACK
The channel is still free after a wait period TRANSMIT DATA
Finish transmitting
Figure 4.3: The state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a station in active mode (basic access mode)
Packet arrives
ACK received and no other packet to transmit IDLE ACK timeout or ACK received but WAIT FOR ACK there is other packet to transmit
READY Channel free The channel becomes busy during a waitperiod CTS timeout
Finish transmitting TRANSMIT DATA
WAIT TO TRANSMIT
The channel is still free after a waitperiod TRANSMIT RTS Finish transmitting
CTS received correctly WAIT FOR CTS
Figure 4.4: The state-machine diagram for an IEEE 802.11a station in active mode (RTS/CTS access mode)
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from other STAs through the medium. The default state of the STA in passive mode is Sensing . If a channel-busy event is received, which indicates that another STA has just started to transmit, this STA shall change to Receiving state. The Receiving state ends when the channel-free event, indicating the end of the transmission, is recorded. Depending on additional information, such as the correct or incorrect decoding of the received frame, type of the received frame, and destination address on that frame, the STA shall respond dierently. For example, if the frame is received correctly, but the destination address is not corresponding to this STA's address, it shall update its NAV and return to Sensing state. This state-machine diagram can be used for both basic access mode and handshaking (i.e. RTS/CTS) access mode. Similarly, the Figure 4.3 and 4.4 describe operations of the STA in active mode, for basic and handshaking access methods, respectively. The active mode is dened as when the STA attempts to transmit data packet. Since these two state-machine diagrams are similar, we need to explain only the diagram for basic access mode. The Idle state is the default state of the STA in active mode. If a packet-arrive event is indicated, the STA shall change its state to Ready . At this state, after a channel-free event is generated (either by this STA or other neighbouring STAs), the STA moves to W ait T oT ransmit state. It is required that the STA stay in this state for a duration equal to DIFS plus an additional random backo time, before attempting to transmit data packet. If the channel turns into busy during wait period, the STA has to return to Ready state. After transmitting the data frame, the STA changes to W ait F or ACK state. It waits here for a duration equal to ACK timeout, to decide if the transmitted packet has been successfully received or not. If an ACK frame is received successfully during timeout period, the STA can change to either Idle (if no more packet to transmit) or Ready state (if there is packet to transmit in queue). Otherwise, the STA has to return to Ready state to perform re-transmission of data frame.
4.1.3 Choice of simulation parameters

In this project, the PHY and MAC simulations adopt all standard parameters from the IEEE 802.11a specications, which are mentioned in Table 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4. In addition, Table 4.1 lists all other parameters used in our PHY and MAC layer simulations. The carrier frequency, fc , is chosen to be 5GHz, which approximates the frequency of 802.11a WLAN devices. Although the output power of IEEE 802.11a STA can vary and be as high as 800mW [2], we choose one constant transmitted power, PT X , of 50mW (or 17dBm) for all STAs during simulation. It is equal to the maximum allowable transmitting power for WLAN devices at 5GHz band regulated by the Danish radio interface specication [7]. We select the noise oor to be -93dBm, which is the same value used in [20]. The path-loss exponent, n, is chosen to be 3.5, which represents the path-loss characteristic in oce building [21]. Since the throughput of WLAN devices is
50
insignicant in region where the SNR of received signal is low, we assume that a packet is always discarded if the SNR is less than SN Rmin . As a result, the usable range of received power is from -83 to 17dBm.
Table 4.1: Parameters for PHY and MAC layer simulations
Description
Notation
fc PT X
Value
Carrier frequency Transmitting power Level of noise oor Minimum SNR level Usable range of received power Path-loss exponent Type of channel models Doppler spread Size of PSDU ACK timeout CTS timeout Detection time
PN OISE SN Rmin PRX n Env BD P ksize ACKtimeout CT Stimeout Tdet
5GHz 17dBm -93dBm 10dB -83 to 17dBm 3.5 A, B , C , D and E 5Hz 1000bytes 108s (2 SIF S + ACKtime) 108s (2 SIF S + ACKtime) 4 s
Practical wireless channels are measured in [12], and equivalent channel models are developed for the HIPERLAN/2 simulation in [13]. These channel models, referred to as environments A, B , C , D and E , represent realistic scenarios for simulation. Since the spectrum of HIPERLAN/2 is almost identical to that of the IEEE 802.11a, we can apply these channel models in our simulation. Table 4.2 provides brief description for each environment, and their PDPs are illustrated in Figure 4.5. For completeness, the detailed characteristics of these environments are given in Appendix D.
Table 4.2: Channel models for PHY layer simulation
Environment Description
A B C D
Typical oce environment for No Line Of Sight (NLOS) condition with 50ns rms delay spread. Typical large open space and oce environment for NLOS condition and 100ns rms delay spread. Typical large open space environment for NLOS condition, and 150ns rms delay spread. The same as environment C, but for LOS condition. A 10dB spike at zero excess delay has been added resulting in a rms delay of about 140ns. Typical large open space environment for NLOS condition, and 250ns rms delay spread.

The PDP of various environments 0 Environment A Environment B Environment C Environment D (first tapRicean) Environment E
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10 Normalized power (dB)
15
20
25
30
35
200
400
600
800 1000 Delay (ns)
1200
1400
1600
Figure 4.5: The PDPs of various environments
In our simulation, the STAs are assumed to be stationary. However, the channel characteristics are changing. The Doppler spread of the channel, BD , is selected to be 5Hz, which is consistent with the measurement results in oce building [5]. The size of PSDU, which is actual information carried by a MAC frame, is 1000 bytes in our simulation. From now on, it is referred to as the packet size, P ksize. The IEEE 802.11 mentions the ACKtimeout and CT Stimeout, but does not specify their values [3]. In our MAC layer simulation, we dene the ACKtimeout and CT Stimeout to be equal to the duration for transmitting an ACK frame (or CTS frame, which is identical) at the minimum mandatory data rate, plus two SIF S . In addition, we also specify Tdet equal to 4s, which is the duration for STA to detect the transmission from another STA. That means if a STA starts its transmission at time t, then other STAs will only be aware of such transmission after t+Tdet . The value of Tdet is chosen to be greater than the air propagation delay, aAirP ropagationT ime, and MAC processing time at the receiving STA, aM ACP rocessingDelay , specied in the IEEE 802.11a standard [2].
4.1.4 Simulation scenarios

The performance of MAC layer is analysed under two dierent simulation scenarios (see Figure 4.6). It is explained in the following sections.
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Scenario I
In this scenario, there are two STAs located at distance d from each other. The trac model for this scenario is balanced and fully loaded. It means that the oered load is much higher than the maximum throughput and there is always at least one packet in the transmission queue.
d
STA Frames
(a)
STA Frames
STA
STA
Frames d
Frames
AP Frames
STA
Frames
STA
Frames
STA (b)
Figure 4.6: (a) Simulation scenario I, and (b) Scenario II
The main purpose of this scenario is to identify the maximum goodput of MAC layer. It is important to note that, since there are only two nodes, hidden terminal problem does not happen in this scenario.
Scenario II
The second scenario consists of one AP and ve STAs. The AP is located at the centre of the circle with radius d, while ve STAs are distributed uniformly on the circle. For this scenario, it is possible to have hidden terminal problem when the radius d becomes large. All the STAs generate the same trac load of 1Mbps and the packet inter-arrival time is exponentially distributed. There is no trac generated at the AP.
4.2 Analysis of simulation results
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Interarrival time
Busy
Holding time Idle time
Idle Time
Arrival time Departure time
Figure 4.7: Illustration of terminology applied for tra c process[1]
The trac model, where packet inter-arrival time is represented by exponentially distributed random process, is often used to describe the typical scenario of a packet-based communication system. Figure 4.7 illustrates the packet inter-arrival time, which is the time interval between two arrivals of contiguous packets. The sole parameter that describes this type of trac model is the intensity of arrival, , which is calculated as follows: Of f eredLoad = (4.1) P ksize where Of f eredLoad is the oered trac load and P ksize is the size of packet. In addition, the mean packet inter-arrival time is inversely proportional to the intensity of arrival [18]: 1 = (4.2) In our case, for a packet size of 1000bytes and an oered trac load of 1Mbps, the mean inter-arrival time is 8000s. We are going to use this mean to generate the instantaneous packet inter-arrival times for our simulation.

In this section, we are going to present our analyses on the results obtained from the simulators and the set of parameters mentioned in 4.1. Our analyses are divided into three parts: (a) performance of the IEEE 802.11a PHY, (b) performance of the standard MAC layer, and (c) performance of the proposed link adaptation schemes.
4.2.1 Performance of the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer The bene t of OFDM technique
Figure 4.8 shows the uncoded BER for BPSK modulation under various environments. The theoretical BER for BPSK modulation on both AWGN and at-fading Rayleigh channels are included for comparison.
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Uncoded BER for BPSK in various environments Theoretical AWGN Theoretical Rayleigh simulated Rayleigh (1tap) simulated Ricean (1tap) Environment A Environment B Environment C Environment D Environment E
10
10
BER
10
10
10
10
15 20 25 Averaged symbol SNR in dB
30
35
40
Figure 4.8: The uncoded BER of BPSK under various environments
As we can see from Figure 4.8, the OFDM technique eectively turns the frequencyselective fading channels into at fading ones. The BER performance of environment A, B , C and E is identical to that of at fading Rayleigh channel. For environment D, where a Ricean component is present, the BER at a given SNR is slightly lower. However, due to the existence of the other taps, the result does not completely coincide with that in a purely Ricean channel.
The in uences of environments

It is necessary to understand the inuences of dierent channel models on both of the uncoded and coded PER performance of IEEE 802.11a PHY layer. Figure 4.9 represents the uncoded PER performance of BPSK modulation scheme under various environments, while Figure 4.10 and 4.11 show the coded PERs for data rate number 1 and 8, respectively. The packet size in this simulation is 1000 bytes. Figure 4.9 shows two interesting points. First, at the low SNR region, the uncoded PER performance of a Rayleigh fading channel is better than that of a Ricean fading channel. In a Rayleigh fading channel, the bit errors are not evenly distributed between packets. Some packets, which experience deep fades, receive more bit errors than the others, and some packets, which experience channel gain, can have little or no bit errors at all. On the other hand, the Ricean fading channel is close to an AWGN, which is a Binary
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Uncoded PER for BPSK under various environments (Pksize = 1000 bytes) 10
0
PER
10
Environment A Environment B Environment C Environment D Environment E Rayleigh flat fading Ricean flat fading
2
10
10
30
35
40
Figure 4.9: The uncoded PER for BPSK under various environments
Convolutional coded PER under various environments (Pksize = 1000 bytes, Rate Index = 1) 10
0
Environment A Environment B Environment C Environment D Environment E Rayleigh flat fading Ricean flat fading
10 PER 10
10
30
35
40
Figure 4.10: The convolutional coded PER under various environments (Rate Index = 1)
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Convolutional coded PER under various environments (Pksize = 1000 bytes, Rate Index = 8) 10
0
PER
10
Environment A Environment B Environment C Environment D Environment E Rayleigh flat fading Ricean flat fading 0 5 10 15 20 25 Averaged symbol SNR in dB 30 35 40
Figure 4.11: The convolutional coded PER under various environments (Rate Index = 8)
Symmetric Channel (BSC) with uniformly-distributed bit error pattern. This results in a poorer PER performance at low SNR region compared to the Rayleigh fading channel. Secondly, among the wideband environments, the environment A provides somewhat better PER performance than that in other environments at low SNR region. This is due to the fact that environment A has the smallest rms delay spread. A smaller delay spread is equivalent to a smaller ratio of OFDM signal bandwidth and channel coherence bandwidth. In such a situation, the channel frequency response is relatively at within the OFDM signal bandwidth, or all OFDM subcarriers experience a similar fading level [24]. If the channel changes slowly during packet duration, bit errors tend to concentrate on some packets, which leaves some other packet error-free or having very little bit errors. On the other hand, in other environments when there is a larger rms delay spread, only a smaller number of subcarriers are aected by the fading. Therefore, the bit errors spread over packets more randomly, even if the channel is changing slowly compare to packet duration. This results in a worse PER performance than that in environment A. The same reason applied to explain the fact that the Rayleigh at fading channel performs much better than the wideband channels in terms of uncoded PER, even though their uncoded BER curves are very similar. The coded PER curves in Figure 4.10 and 4.11 show the same tendencies as those uncoded ones. The environment A has slightly better coded PER performance than those of other environment at low SNR region. Since the coded PERs of environments
57
B , C , D and E are very similar, it is not necessary to analyse MAC layer performance for all of them. In the next section, we will run MAC simulation only for environment A and E . As we can see from the gures, using Rayleigh fading channel to analyse MAC layer performance is an optimistic assumption, because the practical scenario would generally perform much worse.
The e ects of modulation and coding schemes

In Figure 4.12, we compare the coded PER for dierent data rates dened by the IEEE 802.11a standard. The data rates are numbered from 1 to 8, which are corresponding to dierent combinations of modulation and coding schemes (see Table 3.1). An uncoded PER curve using BPSK modulation is drawn in the same gure for comparison. The environment for evaluation is A, and the packet size is 1000 bytes.
Convolutional coded PER at various data rates (Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 10
0
10 PER
10
Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8 Uncoded PER for BPSK 0 5 10 15 20 25 Averaged symbol SNR in dB 30 35 40
Figure 4.12: The convolutional coded PER for di erent data rates
First, we take a look at the dierence between the uncoded PER using BPSK modulation and the coded PERs at data rate number 1 and 2, which have 1/2 and 3/4 rate convolutional coding, respectively, applied on top of the BPSK modulation. It is clear that the convolutional coding helps reducing the system PER considerably. At high SNR value, the coding gain is up to 7dB for 1/2 rate coder, or approximately 4dB for 3/4 rate coder.
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In general, the PER performance is degraded when a higher data rate is used. The only exception is the data rate number 2. Our simulation shows that the rate number 3 can perform equally to the data rate number 2. It is also important to note that the data rate number 4 and 7 have very close performance to that of 5 and 8. The impact of such similarity is going to emerge more clearly later in section 4.2.2.
The e ects of packet sizes

Figure 4.13 illustrates the eects of the packet size on the coded PER performance. The environment A and data rate number 1 are used for simulation. The packet sizes under evaluation are 20, 500, 1000 and 2000 bytes.
Convolutional coded PER for different packet sizes (Environment A, Rate Index = 1) 10
0
Pksize = 20 bytes Pksize = 500 bytes Pksize = 1000 bytes Pksize = 2000 bytes
10
PER 10
2
10
10
30
35
40
Figure 4.13: The uncoded BER of BPSK for di erent packet sizes
Naturally, the larger the packet size, the higher the coded PER is. As we can see from the gure, packet size of 20 bytes can be very reliable. It means small frames, such as RTS, CTS or ACK, have greater chance of being received successfully. On the other hand, larger packet sizes, such as 500, 1000 and 2000 bytes, are far less reliable. However, large packet size is still employed in practice. The main reason for using large packet size is to decrease the ratio between overhead information and data within one packet. In another words, a data packet should neither be too small, which is inecient in terms of overhead information, nor too large because of the high probability of packet error. The gure indicates that the performance of 500, 1000 and 2000-byte packet sizes is
59
only slightly dierent from each other. Thus, we use only the packet size of 1000 bytes to evaluate the MAC layer performance in the next section.
4.2.2 Performance of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer The e ects of data rates
Performance of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer depends greatly on the data rate used at the PHY layer. In Figure 4.14, we present the performance of the MAC layer, in terms of goodput, at all eight available data rates. The goodput is dened as the ratio between total number of information bits received at the destination and the total time needed for transmission. The simulation scenario I is used for evaluation, and resulted total goodputs are plotted against the distance d between two STAs. The total goodput is the goodput of the whole WLAN system, which consists of two nodes in this scenario. In this simulation, the basic access scheme, environment A and packet size of 1000 bytes are employed. In addition, Figure 4.15 and 4.16 are respectively the probabilities of packet errors and collisions for dierent data rates, which are obtained from the same simulation.
Goodput for Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8
20
15 Goodput (Mbps)
10
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.14: Total goodputs for di erent data rates (basic access method, environment A)
Figure 4.14 shows clearly that low data rate, while cannot provide high goodput, is able to achieve reliable connection even at large distance. In contrast, higher data rate,
60
which oers higher throughput at close distance, does not work well at large distance. It is because the PER performance of higher data rate is degraded quickly with SNR, or equivalently with distance (see Figure 4.15). In practice, it is desirable that the STA is able to select an optimum data rate for its transmission, according to instantaneous link condition. We observe that the goodputs of data rates number 2, 4 and 7 are often below that of the other rates. In [5], these rates are said to contribute little or nothing to increase the throughput, if link adaptation scheme is to be implemented. However, as we are going to discuss later in section 4.2.3, these data rates do have some inuences on the performance of the link adaptation.
Probability of packet errors for Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 100 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8
90
80
Probability of packet errors (%)
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.15: The probabilities of packet errors for di erent data rates (basic access method, environment A)
It is also interesting to look at the collision probability obtained from our simulation. Figure 4.16 shows that collisions are more likely to happen at close distance than at large distance, and for lower data rate than for higher data rate. The reason is that the collision probability depends on the value of contention windows, CW , and on the number of STA simultaneously sharing the medium. At a close distance, or for a low data rate, where the probability of re-transmission due to packet error is small, the average CW is small. The average CW is getting larger at large distance, or for higher data rate, due to the fact that more re-transmissions are needed due to packet errors. This resulted in the tendency of collision probability as shown in Figure 4.16.

Probability of collision for Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 7 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8
61
5 Probability of collisions (%)
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.16: The probabilities of collision for di erent data rates (basic access method, environment A)
In addition, for delay-sensitive applications, such as voice or real-time video, the mean transfer delay is a more useful performance measure than the goodput. Figure 4.17 illustrates the delay performance for all available data rates in IEEE 802.11a standard. The highest data rate, number 8, oers minimum delay at close range up to 10 meters. However, at distance greater than 10 meters, data rate number 1 and 3 start to provide much lower transmission delay than that of rate 8. Again, a good link adaptation scheme should be able to provide the minimum transfer delay corresponding to a specic link condition.
Basic access method vs. RTS/CTS access method

The choice of basic access method or handshaking access method does have inuence on the performance of the MAC layer. First, we discuss the dierences between these two access schemes under simulation scenario I. The total goodputs for eight dierent data rates with RTS/CTS access method are shown in Figure 4.18. To assist comparison, the goodput for data rate number 1 with basic access method is included in this gure. In addition, Figure 4.19 illustrates the mean transfer delays for dierent data rates in RTS/CTS access method. We can observe from Figure 4.18 that the goodputs of RTS/CTS access method are very
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Transfer delay for Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 20 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8
18
16
14 Average transfer delay (ms)
12
10
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.17: The mean transfer delay for di erent data rates (basic access method, environment A)
Goodput for Handshaking Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 16 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8 Rate Index = 1 (BA)
14
12
10 Goodput (Mbps)
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.18: Total goodputs for di erent data rates (RTS/CTS access method, environment A)

Transfer delay for Handshaking Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 20 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 2 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 4 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 7 Rate Index = 8 Rate Index = 1 (BA)
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18
16
12
10
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.19: The mean transfer delay for di erent data rates (RTS/CTS access method, environment A)
similar to those of basic access method presented in Figure 4.14. However, the RTS/CTS access method oers slightly lower goodput under this particular simulation scenario. This is due to the fact that additional overhead information (RTS/CTS frames) are introduced in the handshaking access scheme. For the same reason, the mean transfer delays of RTS/CTS access method are also higher compared to those of basic access method (see Figure 4.19). Secondly, the performance of the basic access and handshaking access method are examined under simulation scenario II. In Figure 4.20, the resulted goodputs for data rate number 1 and 8 using basic access and handshaking access schemes are plotted against the radius d of the circle in scenario II. In this simulation, environment A and packet size of 1000 bytes are used. At close distance, which is less than 20 meters, the basic access scheme continues to oer higher throughput. However, the RTS/CTS access mode begins to provide much better goodput at distance greater than 20 meters. This is because the hidden terminal problem can occur in scenario II at this range. Due to hidden terminal problem, the probability of collision for data rate number 1 using basic access scheme suddenly increases (see Figure 4.21). On the other hand, the RTS/CTS access scheme with virtual carriersensing mechanism, which is designed to mitigate the hidden terminal problem, has much lower probability of collision. Consequently, the handshaking access scheme can
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Total goodput at simulation scenario II (Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 5 BA, Rate Index = 1 HA, Rate Index = 1 BA, Rate Index = 8 HA, Rate Index = 8
4.5
3.5
Goodput (Mbps)
2.5
1.5
0.5
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
Figure 4.20: Total goodput at simulation scenario II (Environment A)

Probability of collision at simulation scenario II (Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 45 BA, Rate Index = 1 HA, Rate Index = 1
40
35
Probability of collision (%)
30
25
20
15
10
10
15 20 Distance (m)
25
30
35
Figure 4.21: Probability of collision at simulation scenario II (Environment A)
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oer reasonable goodput at large distance, even if some of the STAs are hidden from the others.
The e ects of environments on performance of the MAC layer

In this section, we study the eects of the environments on the performance of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer. Figure 4.22 is the goodput obtained from environment A and E under simulation scenario I. The packet size is 1000 bytes.
Goodput comparison between environment A and E (Scenario I, Pksize = 1000 bytes) Rate Index = 1 (Env E, BA) Rate Index = 8 (Env E, BA) Rate Index = 1 (Env E, HA) Rate Index = 8 (Env E, HA) Rate Index = 1 (Env A, BA) Rate Index = 8 (Env A, BA) Rate Index = 1 (Env A, HA) Rate Index = 8 (Env A, HA)
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Figure 4.22: Total goodputs in environment A and E
We have discussed in section 4.2.1 that the environment A has slightly better PER performance than that of other environments. Due to this reason, the MAC layer performance is higher in environment A for both basic access and handshaking access methods at large distance (see Figure 4.22). At close distance, where the SNR is high enough to consider the channel error-free, the goodputs for both environments approach the maximum goodput of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer.
4.2.3 Performance of link adaptation mechanism

In this section, we discuss the performance and eciency of the link adaptation mechanism proposed in [5] under realistic channel models. The performance evaluation is
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done using two dierent simulation scenarios: scenario I represents the best-case, while scenario II depicts one typical usage scenario of WLAN system. We also discuss the eect of the data rate number 7 in the proposed link adaptation scheme.
Performance evaluation with scenario I

Figure 4.23 and 4.24 are the total goodputs of the link adaptation schemes with basic access and handshaking access mode, respectively. It is important to note that only data rates number 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are used for link adaptation in this simulation scenario. The reason for using these data rates will be explained later in a separate section. For comparison, goodputs of xed data rates, from 1 to 8, are also displayed. However, not all supported rates are shown, because goodputs of data rate number 2, 4 and 7 are often below or close to those of other rates (see section 4.2.2). The link adaptation scheme is evaluated with three dierent sets of parameters: (S = 3, F = 1), (S = 10, F = 1) and (S = 3, F = 2). The S parameter is referred to as Success Threshold: it is the number of successful transmissions that the transmitter should achieve before it can assume that the link quality has improved and switch to a higher data rate. In contrast, the F parameter is called Failure Threshold, and if the number of failed transmissions is equal to F , the transmitter should fall back to a lower data rate.
Goodput for Link Adaptation with Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3, F=1) Link Adpt (S=10, F=1) Link Adpt (S=3, F=2)
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Figure 4.23: Total goodput of link adaptation for basic access method

Goodput for Link Adaptation with Handshaking Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 16 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3, F=1) Link Adpt (S=10, F=1) Link Adpt (S=3, F=2)
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14
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Figure 4.24: Total goodput of link adaptation for handshaking access method
There are very similar tendencies in both of Figure 4.23 and 4.24. First, the set of parameters (S = 10, F = 1) provides much lower goodput than the other sets at close distance. It is due to the fact that the link adaptation scheme, with a large value of S , cannot react fast enough to the improvement of the link quality, i.e. the STA will maintain a low transmission rate although the quality of the link allows the use of a higher rate [5]. However, at large distance, where only the lowest data rate is possible, S = 10 leads to a slightly better goodput performance compared to those of S = 3. The reason is that, in this case, a large value of S can avoid ineective switching to higher rates when the channel has not improved. Large value of S is also said to be eective when the quality of the link is changing very slowly [5], for similar reason. In our simulation, the channel changing rate is xed at 5Hz and the value of S = 3 is proved to be a better choice at this particular rate. Secondly, we can observe the performance of dierence values of F . The set of parameters (S = 3, F = 1) achieves the higher goodput at distance larger than 10 meters, but (S = 3, F = 2) is superior at closer distance. Ideally, the link adaptation scheme must be able to distinguish whether a collision or a change of link quality is the cause of transmission failure, and it should only decrease the data rate when a change of link quality is detected. However, such distinction is not possible. The value F = 1 dictates the STA to reduce its transmission rate whenever a transmission failure occurs,
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Probability of collision for Link Adaptation with Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 7 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3,F=1) Link Adpt (S=10,F=1) Link Adpt (S=3,F=2)
5 Probability of collisions (%)
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Figure 4.25: Probability of collision of link adaptation for basic access method
regardless of the cause of failure. This scheme works well at large distance, because most of transmission failures are due to the channel quality. At close distance, where the link quality is very good, collision becomes the main source of failure (see Figure 4.25). Therefore, a larger value, F = 2, is a better choice in this case, because it reduces the probability of falling back to lower data rate incorrectly due to collision. This is very important analysis, and we are going to use it for modication of the original link adaptation scheme in the next section. Figure 4.26 and 4.27 are the mean transfer delay of the link adaptation scheme using basic access and handshaking access method, respectively. The transfer delays of xed data rates number 1, 3, 5, 6 and 8 are also included for comparison. Figure 4.26 and 4.27 show that the (S = 10, F = 1) has relatively higher delay than the other sets of parameters at close range, but it starts to provide lower delay with increasing of distance. In contrast, the (S = 3, F = 2) oers the smallest transfer delay at close distance, and very large delay at large distance. While the dierence in terms of goodput for the set (S = 3, F = 1) and (S = 3, F = 2) at close distance is signicant (up to 1-1.5Mbps in Figure 4.23 and 4.24), the gap between their delay curves is really small. Therefore, in terms of mean transfer delay, (S = 3, F = 1) is the best choice among three sets of parameters for this simulation scenario.

Transfer delay for Link Adaptation with Basic Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 20 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3,F=1) Link Adpt (S=10,F=1) Link Adpt (S=3,F=2)
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Figure 4.26: Transfer delay of link adaptation for basic access method
Transfer delay for Link Adaptation with Handshaking Access Mode (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) 20 Rate Index = 1 Rate Index = 3 Rate Index = 5 Rate Index = 6 Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3,F=1) Link Adpt (S=10,F=1) Link Adpt (S=3,F=2)
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Figure 4.27: Transfer delay of link adaptation for handshaking access method
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Performance evaluation with scenario II

The simulation scenario II serves as a typical usage setting for IEEE 802.11a WLAN system. Figure 4.28 and 4.29 shows the average goodput of all individual STAs using the above-mentioned link adaptation scheme (S = 3, F = 1). For comparison, the mean goodputs for xed data rates number 1 and 8 are also plotted in these gures. Environment A and packet size of 1000 bytes are used for evaluation.
Average goodput for basic access method at simulation scenario II (Environment A, Pksize=1000 bytes)
0.8 Average goodput (Mbps)
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0.2 BA, Rate Index = 1 BA, Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3,F=1) 0 0 5 10 15 20 Distance (m) 25 30
Figure 4.28: Average goodput of link adaptation for basic access method
In both Figure 4.28 and 4.29, the link adaptation outperforms the xed rate schemes. With link adaptation, the average goodput of 1 Mbps is maintained at a radius up to 15 meters for all ve STAs. At larger radius, the goodput declines, but it is still higher than that of data rate number 1. For basic access method, the average goodput drops suddenly at large distance, due to hidden terminal issue. In contrast, the RTS/CTS access scheme is able to sustain signicant average goodput even at large distance, for both xed data rate and link adaptation scheme. This observation stimulates the idea of a link adaptation scheme capable of using basic access and handshaking access method alternatively to achieve better goodput.

Average goodput for handshaking access method at simulation scenario II (Environment A, Pksize=1000 bytes)
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0.6
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0.2 HA, Rate Index = 1 HA, Rate Index = 8 Link Adpt (S=3,F=1) 0 0 5 10 15 20 Distance (m) 25 30
Figure 4.29: Average goodput of link adaptation for handshaking access method
The e ect of data rate number 7

In previous sections, data rate number 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are always used for link adaptation. In this section, we discuss the reason behind the selection of these data rates. As we mentioned earlier, in [5], the data rate number 2, 4 and 7 are said to contribute little or nothing to increase the throughput of link adaptation scheme. Two link adaptation schemes are simulated under scenario I to verify this assumption. One of them uses data rate number 1, 3, 5, 6 and 8, while the other switches between rate number 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8. Both of them use the set of parameters (S = 3, F = 1). The goodputs obtained from simulation are presented in Figure 4.30. We can see clearly that the goodputs for link adaptation with and without data rate number 7 are dierent. At close distance, the link adaptation with rate 7 generally oers better goodput that that of link adaptation without rate 7. This phenomenon can be explained in the same way as we have rationalised the advantage of using parameter F = 2 at close distance. At close distance, the link quality is often good enough for using the highest available data rate, which is number 8, for transmission; and collision is the main source of transmission failure. If the link adaptation decreases its data rate incorrectly due to collision, descending from 8 to 7 it's obviously better than from 8 to
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Goodput for Link Adaptation with and without data rate 7 (Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) Incl. rate 7 (BA, S=3, F=1) Incl. rate 7 (HA, S=3, F=1) Excl. rate 7 (S=3, F=1) Excl. rate 7 (S=3, F=1)
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Figure 4.30: Goodput for link adaptation with and without data rate 7
6, since the performance of data rate 7 is very close to that of 8. As a result, the data rate number 7 does have inuence on the performance of link adaptation scheme, and we decide to include this data rate in all our simulation. The data rate number 2 and 4 might also have similar eects on the goodput of link adaptation scheme. Investigation of such eects has not been done in this project. This could be an interesting topic for future works.
4.3 Modi cation of link adaptation scheme

4.3.1 Our proposal
Base on our analyses in section 4.2, we propose a modied link adaptation scheme in this section. Figure 4.31 illustrates the state-machine diagram explaining our modication: There are two key changes from the original link adaptation mechanism. First, we intend to use the value F = 2 at data rate number 7 and 8, and F = 1 for all other rates. If the link adaptation could jump to rate 7 or 8, it means the quality of the link is good and the main source of transmission failures is collision. When link adaptation changes the STA rate from 6 to 7, it waits for one more successful transmission before changing
4.3 Modication of link adaptation scheme

F=2
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success success (s>=S) success (s>=S) success (s>=S) success (s>=S) success (s>=S)
DCF = BA
Rate 8
Rate 7
Rate 6
Rate 5
Rate 3
Rate 1
failure (f>=F)
failure (f>=F)
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failure (f>=F)
failure (f>=F)
DCF = HA
failure (f>=F)
Figure 4.31: Proposed modi cation of the link adaptation scheme
the value of F to 2. This is to ensure the link quality is indeed favourable for data rate 7. However, if the next transmission fails, then we fall back to the previous data rate, and keep using the value F = 1. Secondly, we want to switch to handshaking access method whenever it appears to the STA that the link quality is bad or collision probability is very high in the medium. If the quality of the link is getting worse, it is possible that the distance between two communicating STAs has increased or something has disturbed their communication path. In both cases, hidden terminal problem is likely to occur, and the collision probability would increase if handshaking access method is not used. When the probability of collision is high (for example, due to too many STAs sharing the medium at the same time), using RTS/CTS access method can further reduce the time for retransmitting the large data packet. The modied link adaptation scheme employs handshaking access method for data rate 1 and 3, while basic access method are applied for data rate 5, 6, 7 and 8. This is to ensure that, at large distance, where lower data rate is often selected, the handshaking access mechanism will be used to mitigate hidden terminal problems. In addition, when no hidden terminals presents, at low data rate, the dierence between goodput of handshaking access method and that of basic access method is relatively small (see Figure 4.18).
4.3.2 Performance analysis

In this section, we evaluate the performance of the modied link adaptation scheme. The total goodput of this scheme is plotted against those of original link adaptation with dierent sets of parameters in Figure 4.32. In this simulation, environment A, scenario I and packet size of 1000 bytes are used. As we can see from the Figure 4.32, the modied link adaptation outperformed the original schemes at short distance, due to the fact that F = 2 is used with data rates number 7 and 8. After that, its goodput decreases gradually with distance, and approaches the goodput of the original link adaptation scheme using handshaking access
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Total goodput for modified link adaptation scheme (Scenario I, Environment A, Pksize = 1000 bytes) BA, S=3, F=1 BA, S=10, F=1 BA, S=3, F=2 HA, S=3, F=1 HA, S=10, F=1 HA, S=3, F=2 Modified scheme
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Figure 4.32: Total goodput for modi ed link adaptation scheme
method at distance greater than 15 meters. This is because RTS/CTS access method is applied at rates 1 and 3. In Figure 4.33 and 4.34, the simulation scenario II is employed for evaluation. The rst gure shows the average goodput of the modied link adaptation scheme, while the latter presents the average transfer delay of that scheme. To ease comparison, the performance of original link adaptation scheme (S = 3, F = 2) with both basic access and handshaking access methods are also plotted in the gures. The average goodput of modied link adaptation is similar to that of original scheme with handshaking access method in Figure 4.33. At large distance, the modied scheme is still able to sustain signicant goodput, owing to the usage of handshaking access method at data rate 1 and 3. Analogously, the transfer delay of modied link adaptation is close to existing scheme with handshaking access method in Figure 4.34. However, at short distance, the modied scheme shows lower average transfer delay, due to the fact that its goodput is much higher than that of original scheme with handshaking access method at close distance (see Figure 4.32). In conclusion, the modied link adaptation scheme has been shown to oer high goodput at close distance, and, at the same time, to be able to avoid hidden terminal problem,
4.3 Modication of link adaptation scheme

Average goodput for link adaptation in simulation scenario II (Environment A, Pksize=1000 bytes)
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Figure 4.33: Average goodput for modi ed link adaptation scheme

Average transfer delay for link adaptation in simulation scenario II (Environment A, Pksize=1000 bytes) 6000 LABA, (S=3, F=1) LAHA, (S=3, F=1) Modified LA 5000
Average transfer delay (ms)
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Figure 4.34: Average transfer delay for modi ed link adaptation scheme
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maintaining a considerable average goodput at large distance. Nevertheless, the performance of this proposed scheme needs to be examined more carefully in other scenarios, especially those with faster rate of change of channel characteristics or having dissimilar distances between STAs and the AP. Due to time constrain, such evaluations of this scheme are left for future works.
4.4 Summaries
This chapter presents the insightful descriptions of our Matlab simulator, which aims at analysing the performance of the IEEE 802.11a standard under realistic multipath channel models. In this chapter, we also discuss our analyses on results obtained from the simulation. Our analyses are focused on three topics: (a) performance of the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer, (b) performance of the standard MAC layer, and (c) performance of the link adaptation scheme proposed in [5]. According to our analyses, we propose two possible modications for the link adaptation scheme. These modications are proved to inherit many advantages from the origin link adaptation schemes. The modied link adaptation oers better goodput at close distance, while maintain signicant goodput at large distance.
Chapter
5
Conclusions and future works
5.1 Conclusions
The WLAN technologies, which aim at replacing the traditional wired LAN, are experiencing dramatic growth in the recent years. As a promising international WLAN standard, the IEEE 802.11a is currently receiving a lot of attention from researchers all over the world. However, many researchers have assumed error-free or simple independent uniformly-distributed bit errors in the channel. These simple assumptions are not applicable in the real usage scenario of WLAN, as WLAN connection often suers from time-varying frequency-selective fading channel, making its bit and packet error patterns more complicated. This project, Link adaptation for IEEE 802.11a WLAN over fading channel , is carried out by Mobile Communications Group 992 at the 9th semester at Aalborg University. In this project, we develop a IEEE 802.11a simulator with the following objectives: (a) to analyse the performance of the IEEE 802.11a under practical frequency-selective fading channel models, and (b) to validate the performance of a simple link adaptation scheme proposed in [5] and to discuss possible modications. Based on simulation results, we have obtained several interesting conclusions which will be summarised in this section.
5.1.1 The IEEE 802.11a PHY layer

First, we can see that the OFDM technique, which is employed at IEEE 802.11a PHY layer, has several advantages compared to the traditional single-carrier modulation. In addition to its spectrum eciency, OFDM is more robust to frequency-selective fading channel. In fact, it can eectively turn the frequency-selective fading channels into a at fading ones, with a reasonable implementation complexity. Secondly, dierent environments can aect the PER performance of the PHY layer dierently. In general, the PER performance in any environment with small delay spread is better than that of the environment with large delay spread at low SNR region. This is because, in an environment with small delay spread, the bit errors tend to concentrate on some packets, leaving other packets error-free or having very little bit errors. While 77
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their uncoded BERs are similar, the Rayleigh at fading channel, environment A and environment E have huge dierences in terms of both uncoded and coded PER. This again proves that using Rayleigh at fading channel to evaluate the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer performance is an optimistic assumption, because the practical scenario would generally perform much worse. Thirdly, we observe that the coded PER performance of PHY layer is generally degraded when higher data rate is used. This is obvious, as higher order modulation schemes, such as 16-QAM or 64-QAM, are more sensitive to noise than BPSK, and higher rate codes, such as 2/3 or 3/4, do not have the same capability of correcting bit errors as 1/2 rate convolutional code. Nevertheless, data rates number 2, 4 and 7 have no or very little performance gain compared to those of rates 3, 5 and 8. This makes their MAC layer goodputs indierent from the goodputs due to the data rates 3, 5 and 8. Finally, we analyse the impact of packet size on the coded PER performance of the IEEE 802.11a PHY layer. Naturally, the larger the packet size, the higher the coded PER is. Small frames, such as RTS, CTS or ACK, have greater chance of being received successfully. On the other hand, large data frame are much less reliable. However, a larger packet size also means a smaller ratio between overhead information and useful data within one packet. Thus, the choice of packet size is a trade-o between transmission eciency and probability of packet error.
5.1.2 The IEEE 802.11a MAC layer

Obviously, the performance of MAC layer depends greatly on which data rate is used at PHY layer. We observe that low data rate, while cannot provide high goodput, is able to achieve reliable connection even at large distance. In contrast, higher data rate, which oers excellent goodput at close distance, performs very poorly at long distance. This is also true for the average transfer delay. As a result, it is desirable that the STA has a link adaptation algorithm, which selects the optimum data rate for transmission according to the instantaneous link quality. One interesting observation is the collision probability obtained from our simulation. The collision is more likely to happen at short distance than at large distance, and for low data rate than for high data rate, in case of no hidden terminal problem. The better the link quality, the more likely that collision will occur, due to small average value of CW . The choice of basic or handshaking access method does have inuence on the performance of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer. If there is no hidden terminal problem, the handshaking access method oers slightly lower goodput (or equivalently higher transfer delay) than that of the basic access method at packet size of 1000 bytes. However, if hidden terminal problem occurs, the handshaking access method with virtual
5.1 Conclusions
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carrier-sensing mechanism can keep very low collision probability, resulting in a better throughput than the basic access scheme. Lastly, the eects of dierent environments on the performance of the MAC layer are studied. Due to the fact that environment A has slightly lower coded PER, its MAC layer performance is higher compared to environment E, for both basic and handshaking access methods, at large distance. At close distance, where the SNR is high enough to consider error-free channel, the goodputs for both environments approach the maximum goodput of the IEEE 802.11a MAC layer.
5.1.3 Link adaptation scheme

The simple link adaptation scheme introduced in [5] relies solely on the 802.11 error recovery procedure at the transmitter side, and therefore can be implemented without any change or enhancement to the IEEE 802.11 standard. In this project, the performance of this link adaptation scheme under practical frequency-selective fading channel is evaluated using two dierent simulation scenarios: scenario I represents the best-case scenario, while scenario II depicts a typical usage scenario of a WLAN system. The trac model used in scenario I is balanced and fully loaded, while a constant 1Mbps load with exponentially-distributed packet inter-arrival time is employed in scenario II. The eects of the parameters of link adaptation scheme, S and F , are also examined by simulation. First, a large value of S generally provides much lower goodput than a small value of S . This is due to the fact that large value of S cannot react fast enough to the improvement of the link quality, i.e. the STA will maintain a low transmission rate although the quality of the link has improved. However, at large distance, where only the lowest data rate is possible, large value of S can sometimes lead to slightly better goodput, because it can avoid ineective switching to higher data rate when the channel has not improved. For a slowly-changing channel, large value of S is also said to be eective for the same reason. Second, while a small value of F is applicable at large distance, a large value of F is suitable for close distance, where collision is the main cause of transmission failure. The large value of F is superior in this case, because it reduces the probability of falling back to lower data rate incorrectly due to collision. The simulation results obtained from scenario II indicate that the link adaptation using basic access method experiences severe degradation due to hidden terminal problem. This observation stimulates the idea of a link adaptation scheme that uses both basic and handshaking access methods alternatively to achieve higher throughput at all distance. Our simulation shows that the data rate 7 does have some inuence on the performance of link adaptation scheme. At close distance, link adaptation scheme with rate 7 gen-
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erally oers better goodput than that of scheme without rate 7. This is an analogous eect as using F = 2 when collision is the main source of transmission failure.
5.1.4 Modi cation of link adaptation scheme

From our analyses, we propose two possible modications for the above-mentioned link adaptation scheme. First, the value F = 2 is used for data rate number 7 and 8, and F = 1 for all other rates. This is to avoid falling back to lower rate due to collision. Secondly, we switch to RTS/CTS access method whenever it appears to the STA that the link quality has deteriorated or the collision probability is very high in the medium. To do this, the RTS/CTS access method is employed for data rate 1 and 3, and the other rates use basic access method. The performance of modied link adaptation scheme is also evaluated with simulation scenario I and II, and compared to those of original scheme. The modied link adaptation scheme oers higher goodput at close distance and, at the same time, is able to maintain a signicant throughput under presence of the hidden terminal problem.
5.2 Future works

The project can continue with more extensive studies on both original and modied link adaptation schemes. The performance of such schemes needs to be analysed carefully in other scenarios, especially those with faster rate of change of channel characteristics, or having dissimilar distances between the STAs and the AP, or including the mobility of STAs. The eects of data rate number 2 and 4 on the throughput of link adaptation scheme is also an interesting subject for further investigation. In this project, we have developed a complete simulator for both IEEE 802.11a PHY and MAC layers. Thus, it could be the foundation for investigation of new techniques, such as packet combining, or for doing research at higher level of Open System Interconnection (OSI) model, for example performance of TCP/IP over IEEE 802.11a.
Bibliography
[1] Teletrac Engineering Handbook; ITU-D SG 2/16 and ITC; Draft 2001-06-20. www.tele.dtu.dk/teletrac. [2] High-speed physical layer in the 5Ghz band - Supplement to IEEE std 802.11: Part 11: Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specications. ANSI/IEEE Std 802.11, 1999. [3] Part 11: Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specications. ANSI/IEEE Std 802.11, 1999. [4] David Chase. Code combining - A maximum-likelihood decoding approach for combining an arbitrary number of noisy packets. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 1985. [5] P. Chevillat, J. Jelitto, A. Noll Barreto, and H.L. Truong. A dynamic link adaptation algorithm for IEEE 802.11a wireless LANs. IBM Research Report, December 2002. [6] Matthew S. Gast. 802.11 Wireless Networks: The denitive guide. O'Reilly & Associates Inc., April 2002. [7] CEPT/ECC Working Group. ECC Guidance Document on 5Ghz Wireless LANs. Technical report, The Radio and Telecommunications Terminal Equipment Compliance Association. [8] IEEE 802.11 Working Groups. Status of the IEEE 802.11 standards. www.uninett.no/wlan/ieee80211x.html. [9] Juha Heiskala and John Terry. OFDM Wireless LANs: A Theoretical and Practical Guide. Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2002. [10] Nguyen C. Huan, Nguyen T. Tung, and Nguyen T. Duc. Bit and packet error rates in Rayleigh fading channels with and without diversity. Department of Communication Technology, Aalborg University, June 2003. [11] William C. Jakes. Microwave mobile communications. IEEE Press, 1974. [12] J.Medbo and J-E. Berg. Measured radiowave propagation characteristics at 5Ghz for typical HIPERLAN/2 scenarios. ETSI/BRAN document No. 3ERIO84A. [13] J.Medbo and P.Schramm. Channel models for HIPERLAN/2. ETSI/BRAN document No. 3ERI085B. 81
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[14] Hagenauer Joacho. Rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes (RCPC codes) and their applications. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 1998. [15] Samir Kallel. Complementary punctured convolutional (CPC) codes and their applications. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 1995. [16] Samir Kallel and David Haccoun. Sequential decoding with ARQ and code combining: A robust hybrid FEC/ARQ system. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 1988. [17] A. Kamerman and L. Montean. WaveLAN-II: A high-performance wireless LAN for the Unlicensed Band. Bell Labs Technical J., 1997. [18] Eric Weisstein: The World of Mathematics. Exponential distribution. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ExponentialDistribution.html. [19] J. D. Parsons. The Mobile Radio Propagation Channel. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2000. [20] Daji Qiao, Sunghuyn Choi, and Kang G. Shin. Goodput analysis and link adaptation for IEEE 802.11a wireless LANs. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2002. [21] Theodore S. Rappaport. Wireless communications: Principles and Practice. Prentice Hall PTR. [22] Bernard Sklar. Rayleigh fading channels in mobile digital communication systems - Part I: Characterization. IEEE Communications Magazine, page 136, September 1997. [23] Gordon L. Stber. Principles of mobile communication. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. [24] Richard van Nee and Ramjee Prasad. OFDM Wireless Multimedia Communications. Artech House, 2000. [25] S.B. Weinstain and P.M. Elbert. Data transmission by frequency division multiplexing using the discrete Fourier transform. IEEE Trans. Comm., 1971. [26] Jui-Hung Yeh, Jyh-Cheng Chen, and Chi-Chen Lee. WLAN standards: in particular, the IEEE 802.11 family. http://wire.cs.nthu.edu.tw/wire1x/nal-gallery.pdf.
Appendix
A
List of symbols
: The peak amplitude of the dominant signal : The time it takes a transmitted signal to go from the transmitting STA to the receiving STA aM ACP rocessingT ime : The nominal time the MAC uses to process a frame and prepare a response to the frame aSlotT ime : The slot-time value Bc : Coherent bandwidth of the channel BD : Doppler spread CW : The contention windows Cn (t) : Time variant amplitude of the received signal associated with the nth coming wave d : Distance between the receiver and the antenna d0 : The reference distance of the antenna Env : Type of channel models fD,n : Doppler frequency shift fm : Maximum Doppler frequency fc : Carrier frequency f (r) : The phase of the complex gain of at fading g (t) : Complex gain of the at fading channel gn (t) : The time-variant complex gain h(t, ), h( ) : Impulse response of the multi-path channel I0 (.) : The modied Bessel function of the rst kind and zero order K : K factor, describing the Ricean distribution KM OD : The normalised factor in a modulation scheme Lf s (d) : Attenuation factor M : Number of scattering paths n : Path loss exponential factor n(t) : The additive white Gaussian noise NSD : Number of data subcarriers NSP : Number of pilot subcarriers NST : Total number of subcarriers
A aAirP ropagationT ime
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84
P DP (.) P ksize PT X PN OISE PRX P L(d) P Lf s (d) Pt Pr (d) R Rn ( ) r(t) r(t) s(t) s(t) Sn (f ) SP (f ) SN Rmin Tc Tdet Ts TF F T TP REAM BLE TSIGN AL TGI TGI2 TSY M TSHORT TLON G X X(t) v max n F
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :
List of symbols
Power Delay Prole function Size of PSDU Transmitting power Level of noise oor Usable range of received power Path loss as a function of distance d Free-space path loss at distance d Transmitted power Received power at distance d Rate of the convolutional code Auto-Correlation Function of noise source n(t) Transmitted signal in passband Transmitted signal in baseband Received signal Received signal in baseband Power Spectral Density of n(t) Spectral response (or Magnitude frequency response) Minimum SNR level Coherence time of the channel The duration for STA to detect the transmission from another STA Symbol period IFFT/FFT period PLCP preamble duration Duration of the SIGNAL BPSK OFDM symbol GI duration Training symbol GI duration Symbol interval Short training sequence duration Long training sequence duration Zero-mean Gaussian distributed random variable with standard deviation White Gaussian noise in baseband Velocity Mean excess delay The excess delay The maximum excess delay The excess delay of the nth tap Subcarrier frequency spacing Delay of the incoming multi-path component
85
c n (t) n (t) n 2 ( ) (.) i (t)
: Time delay for all scattering paths from the transmitter to the receiver : Time delay of signal associated with the nth multi-path component : Phase associated with the nth in coming path : AoA of the nth incoming wave : Mean packet inter-arrival time : The short-term envelope of the complex at fading gain : The mean power of the complex at fading gain : rms delay spread : Weighted delta function : Wavelength of the signal : Dirac delta function : the ith subcarrier of the OFDM symbol
Appendix
B
List of acronyms
ACF Auto-Correlation Function ACK Acknowledgement A/D Analog to Digital AM Amplitude Modulation ARF Auto-Rate Fallback ARQ Automatic Repeat Request AoA Angle of Arrival AP Access Point AWGN Additive White Gaussian Noise BER Bit Error Rate BPF Band Pass Filter BPSK Binary Phase Shift Keying BS Base Station BSC Binary Symmetric Channel CCF Cross-Correlation Function CDF Cumulative Distribution Function CDMA Code Division Multiple Access CSMA/CA Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Avoidance CPC Complementary Punctured Codes CTS Clear-To-Send
87
88 D/A Digital to Analog DC Direct Current DCF Distributed Coordination Function DIFS DCF Inter-Frame Spacing DFS Dynamic Frequency Selection DSSS Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum EIFS Extended Inter-Frame Spacing EGC Equal Gain Combining ETSI European Telecommunications Standards Institute FEC Forward Error Correction FCS Frame Check Sequence FDM Frequency Division Multiplex FFT Fast Fourier Transform FHSS Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum FM Frequency Modulation FTM Fourier transform method ICI Inter-Channel Interference IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers IDFT Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform IFFT Inverse Fast Fourier Transform IFS Inter-Frame Spacing ISI Inter-Symbol Interference ISM Industrial, Scientic and Medical GBN Go-back-N GF Galois Field
List of acronyms
89 GI Guard Interval GMSK Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying GSM Global System for Mobile communication HIPERLAN HIgh PErformance Radio LAN HiSWAN High Speed Wireless Access Network HPF High Pass Filter LAN Local Area Network LFSR Linear Feedback Shift Register LLC Logical Link Control LOS Line Of Sight LPF Low Pass Filter NAV Network Allocation Vector NRZ Non-Return Zero m-sequence Maximal-length sequence MAC Medium Access Control MAP Maximum a posteriori MMAC Multimedia Mobile Access Communication MRC Maximal Ratio Combining MPDU MAC Protocol Data Unit MPM Markov process method MS Mobile Station NLOS No Line Of Sight OFDM Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex OSI Open System Interconnection PAP Peak-to-Average Power
90 PCF Point Coordination Function PDF Probability Density Function PDP Power Delay Prole PSD Power Spectral Density PER Packet Error Rate PIFS PCF Inter-Frame Spacing PHY Physical Layer PLCP Physical Layer Convergence Procedure PM Phase Modulation PMD Physical Medium Dependent PPDU PLCP Protocol Data Unit PSDU PHY Sublayer Service Data Unit P/S Parallel to Serial PSK Phase Shift Keying QAM Quadrature Amplitude Modulation QoS Quality of Service QPSK Quadrature Phase Shift Keying RCPC Rate-Compatible Punctured Codes RF Radio Frequency RTS Request-To-Send rms root mean square SC Selection Combining SIFS Short Inter-Frame Spacing SNR Signal to Noise Ratio S/P Serial to Parallel
List of acronyms
91 SR Selective Repeat SW Stop-and-Wait STA Station TDMA Time Division Multiple Access TPC Transmission Power Control WEP Wired Equivalent Privacy WLAN Wireless Local Area Network WSS Wide Sense Stationary UHF Ultra High Frequency U-NII Unlicensed - National Information Infrastructure
Appendix
C
The principles of OFDM technique
The frequency-selective fading channel occurs when the bandwidth of the transmitted signal is larger than the channel coherence bandwidth. Thus, if we can divide the total bandwidth of transmitted signal into several fractions, each of which is less than the coherence bandwidth of the channel, then those sub-channels only experience at fading condition. In other words, we can apply the well-known Frequency Division Multiplex (FDM) technique to turn the frequency-selective fading channel into a at fading one, improving the performance of the transmission link. In classical FDM transmitter, the high-speed data stream is rst divided into NSD parallel streams, which are running at 1/NSD the rate of original one. These streams are then modulated onto NSD non-overlapping frequency subcarriers. Figure C.1 shows the spectrum of the FDM system. Typically, in FDM system, there is a need for guard bands between dierent subcarriers to prevent ICI. This leads to inecient use of available spectrum in FDM technique. The OFDM can be seen as an enhanced version of FDM, where its subcarriers are allowed to overlap. Figure C.1 illustrates the dierence between conventional FDM and OFDM techniques, and it is clear that we can save a lot of bandwidth by using the overlapping subcarriers. Overlapping is possible in OFDM system, because its subcarriers are orthogonal with each other, which is explained in details later. The information is modulated onto a subcarrier by adjusting the subcarrier's phase, amplitude or both. An OFDM signal consists of a sum of subcarriers that are modulated using Phase Shift Keying (PSK) or QAM. If di are the complex PSK or QAM symbols, NSD is the number of subcarriers, T is the symbol duration and fc is the carrier frequency, then one OFDM symbol starting at t = ts can be expressed as [24]: NSD 1 i 2 ts t ts + T NSD di+ NSD exp j2 T (t ts ) i= 2 2 r(t) = (C.1) 0 otherwise
i where r(t) is the complex baseband OFDM symbol, and i (t) = exp[j2 T (t ts )] is the ith subcarrier of the OFDM symbol, where i = NSD , . . . , NSD + 1. Note that each 2 2 subcarrier has exactly an integer number of cycles in the interval T , and the number
93
94
Figure C.1: The spectrums of (a) conventional FDM and (b) OFDM technique
of cycles between adjacent subcarriers diers by exactly one. Due to this property, the subcarriers are 'orthogonal' with each other, i.e. they pass the orthogonality test:
ts +T ts
i (t) (t)dt = j =
ts +T
exp[j2
ts
ij (t ts )]dt T
(C.2)
T 0
i=j i=j
The orthogonal property of subcarriers enables us to obtain the modulated data from each subcarrier individually, even though they are overlapping. For example, to demodulate the j th subcarrier from Equation (C.1), we rst downconvert the signal with a frequency of j/T and then integrate the signal over T seconds. The result of these operations is the desired output dj+ NSD (multiplied by a constant factor T ), as shown
2
95
in Equation (C.3).
ts +T ts
j exp[j2 (t ts )] T
NSD 2
NSD 2
i=
NSD 2
i di+ NSD exp[j2 (t ts )]dt = 2 T ij (t ts )] = dj+ NSD T 2 T
ts +T
di+ NSD
N i= SD 2 2
exp[j2
ts
(C.3)
Figure C.2: Block diagrams of (a) OFDM modulator and (b) OFDM demodulator
Figure C.2 illustrates the direct implementation of the OFDM modulator and demodulator. In this early design, a large array of sinusoidal generators and also a large bank of coherent demodulator with high frequency accuracy are required in order to make it work. This requirement is dicult to achieve, and it made OFDM technology complex and unattractive. Fortunately, Weinstein and Ebert [25] has derived another form for implementing the OFDM system in 1971. The complex baseband OFDM signal as dened by Equation (C.1) is in fact nothing more than the inverse Fourier transform of NSD PSK or QAM symbols. The discrete-time equivalent is the Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT), which is given in Equation C.4, where the time t is replaced by a sample index n [24].
NSD 1
r(n) =
i=0
di exp j2
in T
for i = 0, 1, . . . , NSD 1 (C.4)
= IDF T (di )
In practice, the IDFT can be implemented very eciently by the IFFT. The only requirement is that the number of subcarriers, NSD , must be in the power of 2. The banks of sinusoidal generators and coherent demodulators in Figure C.2 are now replaced by IFFT and FFT operators, respectively. Today, the availability of fast and
96
cheap IFFT/FFT processors has made OFDM technique a favourable choice for many wireless applications, such as digital television broadcasting, WLAN and the future 4th generation wireless network.
C.1 The block diagram of OFDM system

In this section, we are going to discuss the implementation of the OFDM system in more details. A typical implementation of OFDM system is represented in Figure C.3. As we have mentioned earlier, the binary data is rst mapped into PSK or QAM symbols via mapping module. The symbol stream is then divided into NSD parallel sub-streams by the S/P converter, and transformed into time-domain by IFFT operation. The P/S converter combines the parallel signals into OFDM symbols.
Figure C.3: Block diagrams of OFDM system based on IFFT/FFT technique
A guard interval (or guard time) between OFDM symbols is necessary to remove ISI. Figure C.4 shows that, without the guard interval, the rst OFDM symbol will interfere with the second one, due to multipath delay. If a guard interval larger than the expected delay spread is inserted between two OFDM symbols, the interference will not aect the next symbol. The guard interval, TGU ARD , could consist of no signal at all. However, this zero guard interval causes ICI, i.e. subcarriers are no longer orthogonal and crosstalk between dierent subcarriers happens. In order to eliminate ICI, the OFDM symbol is cyclically extended in the guard interval. This ensures that delayed replicas of the OFDM symbols always have an integer number of cycles within the FFT interval, as long as the delay is smaller than the guard time [24]. This whole process is referred to as 'cyclic prex insertion' in the block diagram. To further optimise the spectrum of the transmitted signal, windowing can be applied to the individual OFDM symbols. Windowing an OFDM symbol makes the amplitude go smoothly to zero at the symbol boundaries (see Figure C.5). This procedure helps to greatly reduce the spectrum sidelopes of transmitted signal [24]. At the receiver, reverse operations are performed to achieve the transmitted binary data. First, the cyclic prex is removed from received signal. The FFT operation is applied
C.1 The block diagram of OFDM system
97
Figure C.4: The e ect of guard time between OFDM symbols: (a) Without guard time, and (b) With guard time
Figure C.5: The cyclic pre x insertion and windowing processes
98
on the received OFDM stream. Finally, demapping block converts the obtained PSK or QAM symbols back to binary stream.
C.2 Consideration of OFDM parameters

The parameters of OFDM system are selected based on three main requirements, namely bandwidth, bit rate and delay spread. First of all, the delay spread directly controls the length of the guard interval. As a rule, the guard time should at least be about two or four times the rms delay spread. This value depends on the type of coding and modulation schemes, because higher order QAM (such as 64-QAM) is more sensitive to ISI and ICI than BPSK; while heavier coding obviously reduces the sensitivity to such interference [24]. If the guard interval is chosen, the symbol duration can be selected. To minimise the SNR loss due to guard interval, it is desirable to have symbol duration is much large than the guard time. However, we cannot aord symbol duration to be too large, as a larger symbol duration means more subcarriers with a smaller subcarrier spacing, a larger implementation complexity and more sensitive to phase noise and frequency, as well as an increased Peak-to-Average Power (PAP) ratio. As a result, the symbol duration is often selected to be at least ve times of the guard interval, which implies a 1dB SNR loss because of guard time [24]. Once the symbol duration is also xed, we can calculate the subcarrier spacing as the inverse of symbol duration less the guard interval. Number of subcarriers is equal to the required bandwidth divided by the subcarrier spacing. Finally, to obtain the required bit rate, we can select a suitable modulation scheme and coding rates for our OFDM system.
C.3 Advantages and disadvantages of OFDM technique

The OFDM technique has several advantages compared to the single-carrier modulation. As we have discussed earlier, the key reasons to use OFDM are its spectrum eciency and the ability to deal with frequency-selective fading channel with a reasonable implementation complexity. In a single-carrier system, the implementation complexity is dominated by the channel equalisation, which is necessary when the channel delay spread is larger than about ten percent of the symbol duration. The OFDM system does not required equalisation, and therefore the complexity is greatly reduced. For example, in IEEE 802.11a WLAN application, the usage of OFDM technique reduces the system complexity to 1/10 compared to the equivalent single-carrier system [24].
C.3 Advantages and disadvantages of OFDM technique
99
In single-carrier system, the equalisation hardware is often built into the system and is unalterable. If the delay spread exceeds the value for which the equaliser is designed to work with, the system performance degrades abruptly. Due to error propagation in equaliser, the raw bit error probability increases so quickly that introducing lower rate coding or a lower constellation size does not signicantly improve the situation. For OFDM, however, there are no such nonlinear eects as error propagation, and lower rate coding and/or lower constellation sizes can be employed to provide fall-back rates that are signicantly more robust against large delay spread. This feature is desirable, as it enhances the coverage area and avoids the situation that users in bad spots (e.g. having very large delay spread) cannot get any connection at all [24]. The OFDM technique is also more robust to timing oset than the single-carrier system. In fact, the symbol timing oset may vary over an interval equal to the guard time without causing ICI or ISI. Hence, OFDM is quite insensitive to timing osets. Nevertheless, any deviation from the optimum timing instant means that the sensitivity to delay spread increases, or the system can handle less delay spread than the value it was designed for. To minimise this loss of robustness, the OFDM system should be designed such that the timing error is small compared with the guard interval [24]. On the other hand, two main drawbacks of the OFDM technique are the high PAP ratio and sensitivity to phase noise and frequency oset. An OFDM signal consists of NSD subcarriers, which are independently modulated. If all of those signal are in-phase, they add up coherently to produce a peak power that is NSD times the average power. This high PAP ratio brings several disadvantages to implementation of OFDM system, such as an increased complexity of the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and a requirement of RF power amplier with high dynamic range [24]. However, there are several techniques to reduce the PAP ratio in OFDM system. For example, a special FEC code set that excludes OFDM symbols with large PAP ratio can be applied, so that the high PAP ratio situation can be avoided. All OFDM subcarriers are orthogonal if they all have a dierent integer number of cycles within the FFT interval. If there is a frequency oset between the transmitter and the receiver, then the number of cycles in the FFT interval is not an integer anymore, with the result that ICI occurs after the FFT. Another related problem is phase noise. A practical oscillator does not produce a carrier at exactly on frequency, but rather a carrier that phase modulated by random phase jitter. As a result, the frequency, which is the time derivative of the phase, is never perfectly constant and therefore causing ICI in the OFDM receiver. For single-carrier system, phase noise and frequency osets only give a degradation in the received SNR, rather than introducing interference. This is the reason that the sensitivity to phase noise and frequency oset is mentioned as disadvantages of OFDM system [24]. There are many on-going researches to nd better frequency synchronization techniques, using the cyclic prex or special OFDM training symbols, which minimises the degradation due to frequency error.
Appendix
D
Wireless environments in PHY simulation
Table D.1: Model A. Corresponds to a typical o ce environment for NLOS conditions and 50ns average rms delay spread
Tap Delay Number (ns)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 110 140 170 200 240 290 340 390
Average Ricean Doppler Relative K Spectrum Power (dB)

0.0 -0.9 -1.7 -2.6 -3.5 -4.3 -5.2 -6.1 -6.9 -7.8 -4.7 -7.3 -9.9 -12.5 -13.7 -18.0 -22.4 -26.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic
101
102
Table D.2: Model B. Corresponds to typical large open space and o ce environments for NLOS conditions and 100ns
average rms delay spread

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 0 10 20 30 50 80 110 140 180 230 280 330 380 430 490 560 640 730

-2.6 -3.0 -3.5 -3.9 0.0 -1.3 -2.6 -3.9 -3.4 -5.6 -7.7 -9.9 -12.1 -14.3 -15.4 -18.4 -20.7 -24.6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic
103
Table D.3: Model C. Corresponds to a typical large open space environment for NLOS conditions and 150ns average
rms delay spread

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 0 10 20 30 50 80 110 140 180 230 280 330 400 490 600 730 880 1050

-3.3 -3.6 -3.9 -4.2 0.0 -0.9 -1.7 -2.6 -1.5 -3.0 -4.4 -5.9 -5.3 -7.9 -9.4 -13.2 -16.3 -21.1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic
104
Table D.4: Model D. Same as model C but for LOS conditions. A 10 dB spike at zero delay has been added resulting
in a rms delay spread of about 140ns

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 0 10 20 30 50 80 110 140 180 230 280 330 400 490 600 730 880 1050
Average Ricean Relative K Power (dB)

-0.0 -10.0 -10.3 -10.6 -6.4 -7.2 -8.1 -9.0 -7.9 -9.4 -10.8 -12.3 -11.7 -14.3 -15.8 -19.6 -22.7 -27.6 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Doppler Spectrum
Classic+spike Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic
105
Table D.5: Model E. Corresponds to a typical large open space environment for NLOS conditions and 250ns average
rms delay spread

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 0 10 20 40 70 100 140 190 240 320 430 560 710 880 1070 1280 1510 1760

-4.9 -5.1 -5.2 -0.8 -1.3 -1.9 -0.3 -1.2 -2.1 0.0 -1.9 -2.8 -5.4 -7.3 -10.6 -13.4 -17.4 -20.9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic
Appendix
E
Flowcharts of simulation functions
In this appendix, the owcharts, which illustrate our methods of implementation of simulation functions, are presented. To reduce complexity, we use Matlab matrix notations and some basic functions in the owchart. Therefore, general understanding of Matlab is required to understand this section. The Matlab codes for these modules are also included with this report.
107
108
Figure E.1: The Random sequence generator
Figure E.2: Binary converter module
109
Figure E.3: Convolutional coder module
110
Figure E.4: Interleaving module
111
Figure E.5: Symbol mapping module
112
113
114
115
Figure E.9: The Serial to parallel converter
116
Figure E.10: The IFFT module
Figure E.11: The Parallel to serial module
117
Figure E.12: Wideband channel module
118
Figure E.13: Wideband channel module
119
Figure E.14: Ricean Simulator module
120
Figure E.15: AWGN channel
121
Figure E.16: FFT module
122
Figure E.17: Symbol demapping module
123
124
125
Figure E.20: Deinterleaving module
126
Figure E.21: Viterbi decoder module
127
Figure E.22: Viterbi decoder module (cont)
Figure E.23: Coded bit error counter

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Link adaptation for IEEE 802.

11a WLAN over fading channel

Mobile Communications Group 992, the 9th Semester

AALBORG UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

DK-9220 Aalborg East

Hiroyuki Yomo Tatiana Kozlova Madsen

Publications: Number of pages: Finished:

9 127 the 2nd of January 2004

Nguyen Cong Huan

Nguyen Tien Duc

Francesco Davide Calabrese

Jose Manuel Gonzlez Navarro

Sergio Fernndez Pastor i

Scope of the project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2 The wireless channel

Multi-path propagation and small-scale fading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 The IEEE 802.11a PHY and MAC layers

Description of IEEE 802.11 MAC layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

iv 4 Implementation and result analysis

5 Conclusions and future works

Bibliography A List of symbols B List of acronyms C The principles of OFDM technique

D Wireless environments in PHY simulation E Flowcharts of simulation functions

Background of the project

1.1.1 Advantages and disadvantages of WLAN

Background of the project

1.1 Introduction to WLAN

1.1.2 WLAN standards

The HIPERLAN standard

Background of the project

The MMAC-HiSWAN standard

The 802.11 standard

1.2 Scope of the project

1.2 Scope of the project

Packet combining techniques

Background of the project

Equal gain combining

Maximal ratio combining

HybridARQ type III

Figure 1.1: Classi cation of packet combining techniques

1.2 Scope of the project

Link adaptation techniques

Background of the project

1.2.2 Objectives of the project

2.1 The AWGN channel

Figure 2.1: The AWGN channel

s(t) = r(t) + n(t)

The wireless channel

Figure 2.2: Characteristics of AWGN channel

2.2 Characterisation of wireless channel

2.2.1 Path loss

2.2 Characterisation of wireless channel

Path Loss Exponent (n)

The wireless channel

2.2.2 Large-scale fading

2.2.3 Small-scale fading

2.3 Multi-path propagation and small-scale fading

2.3 Multi-path propagation and small-scale fading

Figure 2.3: A typical plane wave incident on a MS receiver [11]

sn (t) = Re Cn (t)ej2(fc +fD,n )(tn (t)) r(t n (t))

The wireless channel

Cn (t)ej2(fc +fD,n )(tn (t)) r(t n (t))

Cn (t)ejn (t) r(t n (t))ej2fc t