An upper bound on the packet error rate of 802.11a/g Viterbi soft decision decoding in the AWGN channel

In this paper we consider the performance of soft decision decoding in the 802.11a/g OFDM physical layer over an AWGN channel. For BPSK and QPSK modulation we derive the probability that an incorrect path with degree d is selected in the Viterbi soft decision decoding algorithm, while for 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation we derive upper and lower bounds. A bound on the first event error probability can be calculated based on this error probability, and so an upper bound on the packet error rate (PER) obtained.