Higher-speed, higher-performance 802.11a wireless LAN via carrier-interferometry orthogonal frequency division multiplexing

WLANs (wireless local area networks) have emerged as a powerful architecture capable of supporting the requirements of broadband wireless communications. The IEEE 802.11a 5 GHz WLAN standard employs OFDM in its physical layer. This paper introduces carrier interferometry OFDM to the current 802.11a WLAN, and demonstrates that the corresponding small changes to the traditional OFDM scheme lead to notable improvements in probability of error performances and a doubling in throughput. Calling the modified WLAN system pseudo-orthogonal carrier-interferometry WLAN (or PO-CI-WLAN for short), we show that in office buildings, at a bit error rate of 10/sup -3/, PO-CI-WLAN offers a 3 dB performance gain over the IEEE 802.11a 5 GHz WLAN and simultaneously doubles the throughput.