Performance Evaluation of the PHY & MAC for W-LAN Systems

Having a feature-rich IEEE 802.11 Physical and MAC, which has more chance to be a realistic model, is of paramount interest to both Digital Communications researchers and Networking researchers. This book is an effort to study, design and implement a near-realistic IEEE 802.11a physical layer model, with all the phenomena associated with this layer.We present the related concepts and implementation choices, where applicable, in a step-by-step approach within this book. Different propagation models, i.e., large-scale path loss models and fading, bit error rate calculation formulas depending on the type of modulation used and the specific channel type under examination, forward error correction mechanism employed in IEEE 802.11a and related issues, influence of Viterbi decoder on the bit error rate and, finally, bit error distribution models are the major issues elaborated in this work.