The Smart Wireless LAN System: Frame Structure and Physical Layer Design

Garret Okamoto

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712

Abstract The Smart Wireless LAN (SWL) system integrates SDMA with the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard to significantly increase the capacity and throughput of a wireless LAN. The physical layer design of the SWL system allows for remote terminals to transmit and receive as specified in the 802.11 standard. The SWL base station uses an antenna array and SDMA techniques to simultaneously transmit and receive data from up to four terminals at once. Beamforming techniques and offset coding are used to minimize the interference caused by the other users. Computer simulation results show the feasibility and potential of this method.

Introduction

The IEEE 802.11 wireless data standard [1] [2] [3] [4] was created to standardize wireless Local Area Network (LAN) systems to make the systems practical and affordable. In the 802.11 wireless LAN data standard, the base station serves as an access point, bridging traffic between mobile stations and the wired network. The base station grants each node a time slot in an orderly, sequential manner. At the end of each access cycle, a contention period allows any terminal to send a message to the base station or to another terminal. Since the transfer rates in

the standard are set at 1 or 2 Mbits/s, this sequential operation limits the throughput for users on the system.

In this paper, the Smart Wireless LAN protocol (previously known as the Spread Spectrum and Space-Division-Multiple-Access, or SS-SDMA, protocol) is applied to wireless LANs, which was shown in [5] to allow for successful transmission of voice data and to enable the network to serve many times more users than the traditional 802.11 network. Throughput multiplication is achieved over the 802.11 protocol by exploiting the rich spatial diversity existing among spatially separated terminals. Spatial diversity is demonstrated by the amplitude and phase pattern of the data vectors received by an antenna array. Each transmitter located at a certain place has its unique pattern, also called a spatial signature. Once the spatial signatures are acquired, different co-channel signals can be separated based on their unique spatial signatures. Therefore, we can increase the number of virtual time slots by allowing different terminals to transmit in the same time slots without significantly interfering with each other.

The SS-SDMA protocol was renamed the Smart Wireless LAN protocol after several changes were made to improve performance of the physical layer system and to fully comply with the 802.11 protocol. For example, the uplink and downlink algorithms were modified (as described later), only one user is now allowed to transmit at a time during the contention period (required for 802.11 compatibility and to obtain spatial signatures, described below), and a bitwise XOR encryption scheme (described below) is used instead of the public key encryption algorithm that was used previously.

The Smart Wireless LAN Frame Structure

Before the physical layer of the Smart Wireless LAN system could be fully designed, the frame structure of the SWL Network Layer was finalized. An example of this frame structure is shown in Figure 1 and shall be briefly discussed in this section. The SWL frame is divided into a Contention Period, where four users are allowed to transmit at once, and a Contention Free

Period, where only one user is allowed to transmit at a time. The Contention Period is when terminals send messages when they wish to join the network, to change their bandwidth requirements or priority level, or to send messages directly to another terminalbypassing the base station. Operation during this period is not controlled by the base station, but the base station is allowed to contend for access like any other terminal during this period. The Contention Free Period is when data is sent to and from the base station. Operation during this period is coordinated by the base station, which satisfies the needs of the high priority terminals before any time slots are allocated to low priority terminals. In the event that there are not enough available time slots to allocate to all terminals in the network, the base station assigns time slots in a round robin manner within each priority level. In each frame there are N time slots, with the number of contention and contention free slots in each frame adaptively adjusted by the base station depending on the input traffic. There are four rows of time slots during the contention free period, representing the four users that are allowed to transmit at the same time during this period.

Nr

Nc

1
Ns

1 1 7 7

2 7

3 7

3 7

5 5 8 9

5 9

5 9

6 17

10 11 11 12 13 14 14 14 14 14 15 16 18 19 19 Contention Free Slots

High Priority Terminals

Contention Slots
Low Priority Terminals

Figure 1: The Smart Wireless LAN Frame Structure

The Smart Wireless LAN Physical Layer

A simplified block diagram of the physical layer for the SWL system is shown in Figure 2. This structure was created to be 802.11 compliant while allowing for the use of SDMA and was simulated using Matlab. Data is randomly generated for four users, with three of the users serving as interference sources. Encryption is an optional feature that is performed using the wired equivalent privacy (WEP) algorithm used in 802.11 (bitwise XOR with a pseudo random key sequence created by a user's secret key). The data is modulated with BPSK or QPSK to achieve the 1 and 2 Mbits/s data rates specified in 802.11. Each user uses the same code to spread their data, an 11-chip Barker code. The channel model is randomly generated each time the simulation is run and can vary significantly from simulation to simulation. Additive noise is scaled to achieve the specified SNR between the desired signal and the gaussian noise. The interleave and deinterleave operations are highlighted because this is an optional feature of the SWL system which is being studied to see if interleaving improves the quality of the transmissions. The reason that interleaving has potential is because bit errors due to propagation, especially in indoor environments, tend to occur in bursts. These bursts are not recoverable by the Viterbi decoding; however, if we spread these errors out by interleaving the data we can recover from the burst errors. The convolutional coding, Viterbi decoding, encryption, and decryption blocks are highlighted because they are currently commented out of the SWL computer simulation, as explained later.

Data Creation Channel Effects

Convolutional Code Data Pulse Shape Raised Cos

Encrypt Data Spreading via Barker Code

Interleave Data Modulation BPSK/QPSK

Interference Addtive Noise Compute BER Despread Signal Viterbi Decoder Demodulate Data Phase Ambiguity Deinterleave Data Decrypt Data

Figure 2: The Smart Wireless LAN Physical Layer Block Diagram

Multiple users transmitting in the same frequency band at the same time requires special care for the uplink and downlink of signals. When the base station wishes to downlink data to four terminals at once, it extends the above block diagram in the following manner. First, it creates the data vectors for all four terminals and uses the assumed knowledge of their spatial signatures to perform beamforming to mitigate interference between the terminals. Second, it inserts a 3-chip delay between each the resulting signal vectors, as shown in Figure 3. Each row represents the spreading code used by a terminal and the actual starting point of the Barker code is shown by a solid vertical line. Because of the ideal property of the Barker code (minimal correlation between the various parts of the code), this allows the coding gain from spreading to be achieved despite all four users using the same code. Due to the beamforming effectiveness as shown in [6], each user receives one significant and distinct signal to synchronize to and can easily despread its signal in the standard manner. Beamforming techniques currently being studied include randomly generated spatial signatures, placing nulls for the other users, and optimal beamforming methods.

+1 -1 +1 +1

-1 -1 +1 +1

+1 -1 +1 -1

+1 +1 -1 +1

-1 -1 -1 +1

+1 +1 -1 +1

+1 +1 +1 -1

+1 -1 -1 -1

-1 +1 +1 -1

-1 +1 +1 +1

-1 +1 -1 -1

Figure 3: Implementation of the Chip Offset to Enable Multiple User Downlink

When four users wish to uplink to the base station at the same time, the base station can separate the signals because it already knows the spatial signatures of the individual users. Using that knowledge, the base station performs a simple pseudoinverse operation to obtain the matrix that will be multiplied with the received waveform to obtain the four data vectors containing the signals of the four terminals. A maximum likelihood method is also being studied which should achieve superior performance than the pseudoinverse method at a cost of additional computational complexity.

The assumption that we already know the spatial signatures of each terminal is a reasonable one because each terminal is required to transmit a frame to the base station during the contention period in order to join a network. Since only one user is allowed to transmit at a time during this period (adhering to the Distributed Coordination Function Protocol in 802.11), we can easily find that user's spatial signature. Experimental studies in [7] showed that the spatial signature remains fairly constant over time for a stationary terminal. If the transmission quality from a terminal appears to be degrading, the base station can send a request to that terminal to transmit again during the contention period to update its spatial signature.

Simulation Results

A computer simulation was constructed via Matlab to simulate the uplink and downlink of the physical layer of the Smart Wireless LAN system. A user-specified number of terminals transmit and/or receive data simultaneously in the methods described above. Convolutional coding is done as specified in 802.11; however, it and the Viterbi decoding routines were commented out of the program after they were verified to work because they slowed the simulation down. Similarly, the encryption and decryption routines were commented out of the program after they were verified to work. They will be included in a later version of the simulation in order to get the final performance results.

10

10
Bit Error Rate

10

10

10

12 14 SNR (dB)

16

18

20

Figure 4: SNR vs. BER for Downlink Transmission to Four Terminals Simultaneously

The simulations used a data frame size of 1000 bits, with four users transmitting frames at the same time. Each simulation ran for 10 frames for each random channel, and the average BER was computed using at least 5 random channels at each SNR level. A typical SNR vs. BER curve is shown in Figure 4, where a 20 dB level of beamforming is assumed to have been achieved. Note that the SNR specified does not include the interference in the system due to the other three users which are transmitting at the same time as our desired signal, so the actual SINR of the system could have been much worse than the SNR listed. Also note that the BER results in Figure 4 are for the SWL system without Viterbi decoding. The BER is significantly reduced when Viterbi decoding is included in the simulation, as expected from Digital Communication theory [8]. Finally, note that we assume that the base station uses an eightelement antenna array while the individual terminals use a single antenna.

Conclusion

The IEEE 802.11 wireless data standard will standardize wireless LAN systems and was created to handle a few terminals in a round robin manner. The Smart Wireless LAN protocol was created to allow an 802.11 base station to be replaced with a SWL base station. Because the SWL base station is fully 802.11 compliant, the individual terminals could operate in the same manner as before but the overall LAN would be able to accommodate many times more users, with increased throughput and a significant reduction in delays.

The SWL enables multiple terminals to transmit in the same time slots by exploiting the rich spatial diversity existing among spatially separated terminals. Both downlink and uplink operations are made possible by using the spatial signature knowledge found from transmission during the contention period. Computer simulation results show that the SWL system performs satisfactorily for each terminal.

Acknowledgments

This work was sponsored in part by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N0001495-1-0638, the Joint Services Electronics Program under Contract F49620-95-C-0045, National Science Foundation under Grant MIP-9502695, Motorola, Inc., Southwestern Bell Technology Resources, Inc., Texas Instruments, and a Microelectronics and Computer Development Fellowship and an Engineering Doctoral Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. I would also like to thank my advisor, Prof. Guanghan Xu, for the guidance and support that he provided for my research.

References

[1]

L. Goldberg, Wireless LANs: Mobile-computings second wave, Electronic Design,

pages 55-72, June 1995. [2] L. Goldberg, Mac protocols: The key to robust wireless systems, Electronic Design, pages 63-74, June 1994. [3] C. Leidigh, An 802 LAN Standards Primer, Communication Systems Design, pages 3040, September 1995. [4] A. Juodikis, Wireless LANs: Considerations and Implementation, Communication Systems Design, pages 48-53, September 1995. [5] G. Okamoto and G. Xu, Throughput Multiplication of Wireless LANs: Spread Spectrum with SDMA, In Proc. VTC96, April 1996. [6] W. Lee and S. Pillai, Beamforming for Efficient Interference Suppression in a Mobile Communication Environment, In Proc. Asilomar95, November 1995. [7] G. Okamoto, Spread Spectrum with SDMA for Wireless LANs: Simulation and Results, In Proc. 1995 University of Texas at Austin Student Research Conference, November 1995. [8] E. Lee and D. Messerschmitt, Digital Communication, Second Edition, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.