On the Field Level Loss of a VHT PPDU in a MIMO-OFDM System for a WiFi Direct 802.11ac WLAN

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to reduce Packet Error Rate (PER) of a Very High Throughput (VHT) physical layer frame in a WiFi Direct (WD) 802.11ac Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) by examining the loss of individual fields. To this end, a 2x2 Multiple Input Multiple Output - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) transceiver is implemented under a TGn multipath fading channel D. The system generates VHT Physical Layer Conformance Procedure (PCLP)- Protocol Data Unit (PPDU) frames which are passed through the TGn channel D. Thereafter performance of the system is determined by calculating the overall PER. Then the impact of each field of the VHT PPDU is analysed separately in order to estimate their percentage loss in the overall PER. The field level scrutinization of the PER provides a design level insight into the VHT PPDU performance. Based on simulation results, an efficient methodology is proposed to reduce the overall PER without changing the hardware of the current 802.11ac system. In addition, since a detailed packet loss analysis can determine the efficiency of a rate selection algorithm. Therefore the findings of the paper can also be taken into account while designing an efficient rate selection algorithms for the WD 802.11ac WLAN.