Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard Optimum and Sub-optimum receiver in frequency-selective, slowly fading Nakagami channels with AWGN and pulsed noise jamming.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the performance of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network (WLAN) standard receiver when the signal is transmitted over a frequency selective, slow fading Nakagami channel in a worst case, pulse-noise jamming environment. The different combinations of modulation type (both binary and non-binary modulation) and convolutional code rate specified by the WLAN standard, are examined. Receiver performance with Viterbi soft decision decoding (SDD) is analyzed for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) alone as well as for AWGN plus pulsenoise jamming (PNJ). The performance of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard receiver is examined both for the scenario where perfect side information is assumed (optimum receiver) and when it is not (sub-optimum receiver). For the sub-optimum receiver scenario, the receiver performance is examined both when noise-normalization is utilized and when only linear combining is utilized. The analysis indicates that the receiver performance is severely affected by the pulse-noise jamming environment for the linear combining scenario; however, the suboptimum receiver performance is significantly improved when noise-normalization is implemented.