ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS
OFDM is of great interest by researchers and research laboratories all over the world. It has already been accepted for the new wireless local area network standards research 802.11a, High Performance LAN type 2 (HIPERLAN/2) and Mobile Multimedia Access Communication (MMAC) Systems. Also, it is expected to be used for wireless broadband multimedia communications.
Data rate is really what broadband is about. The new standard specify bit rates of up to 54 Mbps. Such high rate imposes large bandwidth, thus pushing carriers for values higher than UHF band. For instance, research802.11a has frequencies allocated in the 5- and 17- GHz bands.
This project is oriented to the application of OFDM to the standard research 802.11a, following the parameters established for that case.
OFDM can be seen as either a modulation technique or a multiplexing technique. One of the main reasons to use OFDM is to increase the robustness against frequency selective fading or narrowband interference. In a single carrier system, a single fade or interferer can cause the entire link to fail, but in a multicarrier system, only a small percentage of the subcarriers will be affected. Error correction coding can then be used to correct for the few erroneous subcarriers. The concept of using parallel data transmission and frequency division multiplexing was published in the mid-1960s Some earlydevelopment is traced back
In a classical parallel data system, the total signal frequency band is divided into N nonoverlapping frequency subchannels. Each subchannel is modulated with a separate symbol and then the N subchannels are frequency-multiplexed. It seems good to avoid spectral overlap of channels to eliminate interchannel interference. However, this leads to inefficient use of the available spectrum. To cope with the inefficiency, the ideas proposed from the mid-1960s were to use parallel data and FDM with overlapping subchannels, in which, each carrying a signaling rate b is spaced b apart in frequency to avoid the use of high-speed equalization and to combat impulsive noise and multipath distortion, as well as to fully use the available bandwidth.
The word orthogonal indicates that there is a precise mathematical relationship between the frequencies of the carriers in the system. In a normal frequency-division multiplex system, many carriers are spaced apart in such a way that the signals can be received using conventional filters and demodulators. In such receivers, guard bands are introduced between the different carriers and in the frequency domain, which results in a lowering of spectrum efficiency.
It is possible, however, to arrange the carriers in an OFDM signal so that the sidebands of the individual carriers overlap and the signals are still received without adjacent carrier interference. To do this, the carriers must be mathematically orthogonal. The receiver acts as a bank of demodulators, translating each carrier down to DC, with the resulting signal integrated over a symbol period to recover the raw data. If the other carriers all beat down the frequencies that, in the time domain, have a whole number of cycles in the symbol period T, then the integration process results in zero contribution from all these other carriers. Thus, the carriers are linearly independent (i.e., orthogonal) if the carrier spacing is a multiple of 1/T.
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