High-performance 802.11a wireless LAN via carrier-interferometry orthogonal frequency division multiplexing at 5 GHz

Abstract

WLAN (wireless local area networks) have emerged as a powerful architecture capable of meeting the needs of next generation broadband wireless communications. The IEEE 802.11a 5 GHz WLAN standard employs OFDM in its physical layer. This paper demonstrates that small changes in this OFDM scheme lead to notable improvements in probability of error performances. Calling the modified WLAN system carrier-interferometry WLAN (or CI-WLAN), we show that in office buildings, at a bit error rate of 10/sup -3/, CI-WLAN offers a 3 dB performance gain over the 802.11a 5 GHz WLAN.