Wi-Fi Integration to the 4G Mobile Network

3802.11a/g Interfaces

3.1. 802.11a interface

3.1.1. PLCP sub-layer

On transmission, the physical layer convergence procedure (PLCP) converts the PLCP service data units (PSDU) from the MAC (Medium Access Control) layer to form the PLCP protocol data units (PPDU), adding a preamble and a header.

On reception, the preamble and header facilitates demodulation of the signal and the delivery of the PSDU data units.

The PLCP frame ends with tail and padding bits. The PLCP header contains the LENGTH and RATE fields, a reserved bit, an even parity bit and the SERVICE field (Figure 3.1).

The LENGTH and RATE fields, the reserved bit and the even parity bit, the SIGNAL set, constitute an OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) symbol and are transmitted with the most robust modulation and coding scheme:

• – BPSK (Binary Phase-Shift Keying) modulation;
• – coding rate of 1/2.

The SERVICE field, the PSDU data units, the tail and padding bits, the DATA set, are transmitted at the rate indicated in the RATE field and constitute several OFDM symbols (Table 3.1).

The first seven bits of the SERVICE field are used to synchronize the descrambler on reception. The other nine bits are reserved for later use.

The LENGTH field encodes the number of bytes of the PSDU data unit.

The tail bits of the SIGNAL symbol allow the decoding of the RATE and LENGTH fields. The RATE and LENGTH fields allow the mobile to predict the duration of the PLCP frame, even if the bit rate is not supported by the ...