A Study of the Next WLAN Standard IEEE 802.11ac Physical Layer

This thesis studies the Physical Layer (PHY) of the new IEEE 802.11acWireless Local Access Network (WLAN) standard. The 11ac is built basedon the 11n successful standard. The standard is expected to be completedby the end of 2013. And it promises a Very High Throughput (VHT),and robust communication. In order to achieve that, the 11ac uses morebandwidth, it employs higher numbers of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output(MIMO) spatial streams, and higher orders of modulations. The 11ac PHYframe structure is studied in details. The transmitter and receiver blocks areexplained and implemented by MATLAB. Bit Error Rate (BER) and ErrorVector Magnitude (EVM) simulations of the PHY were run. The effectof different Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), and bandwidths werestudied. The performance of MIMO and Space-Time Block Coding (STBC)was investigated. The simulation results shows how the 11ac benefits fromthe new employed features. The created MATLAB simulation program canbe used for further tests and research.

[1]  Per Ola Börjesson,et al.  ML estimation of time and frequency offset in OFDM systems , 1997, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[2]  Donald C. Cox,et al.  Robust frequency and timing synchronization for OFDM , 1997, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[3]  M.R. Shikh-Bahaei,et al.  Interference cancellation in W-CDMA cellular structures using statistical processing , 1999, Seamless Interconnection for Universal Services. Global Telecommunications Conference. GLOBECOM'99. (Cat. No.99CH37042).

[4]  Siavash M. Alamouti,et al.  A simple transmit diversity technique for wireless communications , 1998, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[5]  Lee Garber,et al.  Wi-Fi Races into a Faster Future , 2012, Computer.

[6]  Kuang-Hao Lin,et al.  Implementation of channel estimation for MIMO-OFDM systems , 2010, 2010 International SoC Design Conference.

[7]  Chia-Horng Liu,et al.  On the design of OFDM signal detection algorithms for hardware implementation , 2003, GLOBECOM '03. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37489).

[8]  John G. Proakis,et al.  Digital Communications , 1983 .

[9]  Hiroshi Ochi,et al.  PAPR Reduction for Very High Throughput WLAN with Backward Compatibility to IEEE802.11 a/n , 2009 .

[10]  Thomas K. Paul,et al.  Wireless LAN Comes of Age: Understanding the IEEE 802.11n Amendment , 2008, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine.

[11]  Andrew J. Viterbi,et al.  Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimum decoding algorithm , 1967, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[12]  Sang Kyu Park,et al.  Performance analysis of the MIMO zero-forcing receiver over continuous flat fading channels , 2010, The 3rd International Conference on Information Sciences and Interaction Sciences.

[13]  Upamanyu Madhow.  Fundamentals of Digital Communication: References , 2008 .

[14]  Zhu Wei,et al.  Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication PrinciplesA New EVM Calculation Method for Broadband Modulated Signals and Simulation , 2007, 2007 8th International Conference on Electronic Measurement and Instruments.

[15]  Wayne D. Grover,et al.  Next Generation Transport Networks: Data, Management, and Control Planes , 2005 .