Lecture 5: Wireless Physical

Layer: Wrap-up
 Recap
▪ Radio waves as carriers of data bits in mobile physical layers
▪ Modulation techniques
▪ Single carrier: ASK, FSK, PSK, QAM
▪ Multi-carrier: OFDM
▪ Channel coding
▪ Block codes
▪ Convolutional codes
▪ Wireless channel
▪ Path loss (slower timescale)
▪ Multipath fading (faster timescale)
▪ Channel noise
▪ Channel impulse response (h) and channel frequency response (H)
▪ Coherence bandwidth and coherence time of the channel
▪ Shannon’s channel capacity formula
▪ Signal to noise ratio (SNR) decides how easily you can distinguish bits
▪ Channel bandwidth and limits on how fast you can send digital pulses
Putting it all together: transmission
▪ We will describe how a WiFi / 802.11 physical layer works.
Let’s take the example of 802.11g
▪ 20 MHz bandwidth in the 2.4Ghz band is used
▪ The physical layer transmits one frame (obtained from
higher MAC layer) at a time
▪ CRC is added to the message to enable error detection
▪ Bits in a packet converted to coded bits using a
convolutional code
▪ Interleaving of coded bits to withstand burst errors
▪ Bits split into 48 parallel streams for OFDM (OFDM uses 64
subcarriers, but only 48 carry data)
▪ In each subcarrier stream, bits are grouped into symbols
based on the modulation scheme used (BPSK has 1 bit per
symbol, QPSK has 2, QAM16 has 4, QAM64 has 8)
Putting it all together: transmission (2)
▪ Each group of bits is modulated using the corresponding
subcarrier
▪ Group of bits mapped to amplitude/phase values of the
subcarrier wave (using constellation diagrams)
▪ The vector of 64 such aplitude/phase values are passed through
iFFT to get a 64-sample time domain signal
▪ The time domain signal is converted to the appropriate higher
frequency by modulating with a carrier at 2.4 Ghz
▪ A physical layer header describing the modulation, coding,
frame length etc is added to the start of the packet
▪ A special preamble symbol is added to the start of the
frame. The preamble is a known set of bits modulated by
BPSK, so all WiFi nodes know what the signal looks like
 Putting it all together: reception
▪ Receiver is always searching the radio waves at the given frequency
for the special known preamble
▪ When the preamble is found, the receiver detects start of the frame
and starts decoding the samples
▪ The wireless channel h is estimated from the preamble and
compensated on all subsequent samples of the packet
▪ The receiver takes each OFDM symbol, splits it into subcarriers (by
using FFT), uses the amplitude and phase of the subcarrier to
demodulate the transmitted bits
▪ The demodulated bits are de-interleaved and passes through a
channel decoder (e.g., Viterbi decoder) to recover the original
message bits from the decoded bits
▪ Finally, CRC is checked to see if all bits received correctly
▪ Correct frames are passed up to higher layers
 Bit rate of a transmission
▪ Each OFDM symbol has 64 samples
▪ 64 subcarriers, after iFFT, result in 64 time samples
▪ On a 20MHz channel, we can send 20M samples per
second
▪ At 20M samples/sec, each symbol takes 3.2
microseconds
▪ A 0.8 microsecond guard time added to each symbol
▪ Therefore, each OFDM symbol takes 4 microsec.
▪ Channel delay spread of the order 100ns, so very little ISI
▪ If single carrier modulation were used, note that symbols
have had to be 64 times shorter
 Bit rate of a transmission (2)
▪ Bit rate depends on modulation and coding
scheme used
▪ For example, QAM16 and rate ½ code
▪ Each OFDM symbol has 48 data subcarriers -> 48*4
coded bits -> 48*2 data bits
▪ 96 bits in one symbol in 4 microsec -> bit rate is
96/4 = 24 Mbps
▪ Similarly, we can get all bit rates in 802.11g (6, 9,
12, 18, 24, 36, 48, 54 Mbps) by various
combinations of modulation (BPSK, QPSK, QAM16,
QAM64) and coding rates (1/2, 2/3, 3/4)
 Bit rate of a transmission (3)
▪ Higher bit rates require higher SNR to work properly
▪ For example, if SNR is 10dB, 6Mbps and 9Mbps rates
may have 0% loss, 12 Mbps rate has 10% loss, 18 Mbps
has 50% loss, and 24Mbps and higher have 100% loss.
What is the best bit rate to use?
▪ Clearly, 12 Mbps has higher throughput = bit_rate *
packet_delivery_ratio
▪ We will study how bit rates are picked in WiFi in detail
later in the course
▪ For now, understand where the numbers in the rates
come from.
 MIMO – new idea
▪ Recent physical layer designs (e.g., newer WiFi
standards like 802.11n, and cellular systems like LTE)
use a new concept called multiple-input-multiple-
output (MIMO) to improve physical layer rates further
▪ In MIMO, you have multiple antennas at transmitter
and receiver
▪ You can use multiple antennas in two ways
▪ Send and receiver multiple copies of the same signal, to
increase chances of successful reception (transmit /
receive diversity mode)
▪ Send multiple parallel streams of data (spatial multiplexing
mode)
▪ Notation: 2X2 MIMO means 2 transmit antennas and 2
receive antennas
 MIMO (2)
▪ Receive diversity – if you have multiple antennas at receiver, you
can receive multiple copies of the signal and combine them in an
optimal way. This way, you can get lower errors.
▪ Transmit diversity – send multiple copies of the signal in a clever
way so that they combine constructively at receiver
▪ Spatial multiplexing – send multiple parallel streams of information
between sender and receiver. If you have N transmit antennas and
N receive antennas, you can theoretically send N parallel streams of
data between sender and receiver
▪ For example, consider the 54 Mbps rate (in a single antenna
system). If used in spatial multiplexing mode in 2X2 MIMO
configuration, we can get a rate of 108 Mbps