A comparison of HIPERLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a physical and MAC layers

At present, wireless local area networks (WLANs) supporting broadband multimedia communication are being developed and standardized. Two such standards are HIPERLAN/2, defined by ETSI BRAN and the IEEE's 802.11a. These WLAN standards will provide data rates up to 54 Mbps (in a channel spacing of 20 MHz) in the 5.2 GHz band. In this paper, an overview of the the standards is presented together with software simulated physical layer performance results for each of the transmission modes defined in the two standards. Furthermore, the differences between the standards (protocol data unit-PDU-size, upper protocol layers etc.) and the effects on applications are discussed.