Reduction of power consumption in a Viterbi Decoder for OFDM-WLAN

This letter shows how the dependency between the puncturing of the coding rate and the decision depth needed by the Viterbi decoder can be used in an OFDM-WLAN receiver to reduce the power consumption. In WLAN standards there are different transmission modes, some of them work with a basic rate ½ convolutional code, and others with a punctured version of the basic code. As the modes with the punctured code need a higher decision depth than those with the rate ½ code, these modes cause a higher power consumption due to the greater area employed. In this letter it is presented an architecture that disables the unnecessary hardware in the rate ½ code modes, and thus, the dynamic power consumption can be reduced.