Study of Optical OFDM System for Wireless LAN Applications

The advantages of optical fiber make it possible to extend the data rate transmission and propagation distance. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as a multicarrier technique (MC) is used in hybrid optical-wireless system designs because it has the best spectral efficiency to radio frequency (RF) interference and lower multipath distortion. In this dissertation, a study and evaluation of optical OFDM based wireless local area network (W-LAN) systems are presented. The baseband of the OFDM signal is fully transmitted and up-converted to a radio frequency signal. Also, to reduce system costs, simple base stations (BSs) are interconnected to a central office (CO) via an optical fiber. All the required operations are achieved in the CO. The directly modulated laser (DML) and continuous wave (CW) laser are used in the system simulations as optical laser sources. Identical rectangular microstrip patch antennas have been used at the transmitter and the receiver as well. The simulations were carried out for different SMF and MMF lengths, and the variable wireless distance between the transmitting and receiving antennas was in a range of 40 dB to 80 dB. The purpose of this work is to provide a framework for integrating wireless and optical technologies in one system with the presence of OFDM technology. The required microstrip patch antenna parameters for the system are analyzed and designed. The microstrip patch antenna (S-parameters) is loaded into the Optisystem communication software tool in Touchstone format. As a result, this achievement gives a greater impetus to design an integrated optical-wireless system, and simulation results validate the proposed technique. Then, the integration of the microstrip patch antenna and optical OFDM system is achieved, and the performance is intensely studied. The entire system has been presented by developing analytical models and simulations. The system performance results are obtained regarding EIRP, SNR, signal constellations and BER. The results show that this integrated optical wireless link is very robust for carrying OFDM based wireless LAN signals over an optical fiber. Moreover, using an active patch antenna in the system helps to increase the coverage service to more than 30 meters when an SMF of 80 km length is utilized

Frequency-aware rate adaptation and MAC protocol

There has been burgeoning interest in wireless technologies that can use wider frequency spectrum. Technology advances, such as 802.11n and ultra-wideband (UWB), are pushing toward wider frequency bands. The analog-to-digital TV transition has made 100-250 MHz of digital whitespace bandwidth available for unlicensed access. Also, recent work on WiFi networks has advocated discarding the notion of channelization and allowing all nodes to access the wide 802.11 spectrum in order to improve load balancing. This shift towards wider bands presents an opportunity to exploit frequency diversity. Specifically, frequencies that are far from each other in the spectrum have significantly different SNRs, and good frequencies differ across sender-receiver pairs. This paper presents FARA, a combined frequency-aware rate adaptation and MAC protocol. FARA makes three departures from conventional wireless network design: First, it presents a scheme to robustly compute per-frequency SNRs using normal data transmissions. Second, instead of using one bit rate per link, it enables a sender to adapt the bitrate independently across frequencies based on these per-frequency SNRs. Third, in contrast to traditional frequency-oblivious MAC protocols, it introduces a MAC protocol that allocates to a sender-receiver pair the frequencies that work best for that pair. We have implemented FARA in FPGA on a wideband 802.11-compatible radio platform. Our experiments reveal that FARA provides a 3.1x throughput improvement in comparison to frequency-oblivious systems that occupy the same spectrum.Industrial Technology Research InstituteNational Science Foundation (U.S.)

A Compact Dual-Polarized 4-Port Eleven Feed with High Sensitivity for Reflectors over 0.35-1.05 GHz

We present significant improvements to the circular Eleven feed technology for a dual-reflector system operating over 0.35-1.05 GHz as a backup for the square kilometer array (SKA) project Band 1. In this work, the number of the feed ports is reduced to 4 from the previous 8 for dual polarization using a novel geometry at the center. The design is carried out by optimizing with a social civilization algorithm. The resulting improvements include a reflection coefficient below -12dB, an aperture efficiency above 70% at the upper end of the band, a maximum cross-polar level under -15dB, and an ohmic loss about 0.05 dB. A prototype based on this design has been manufactured and the design simulations have been verified against measurements. A simulated sensitivity of the dual-reflector receiver system for the SKA project based on the measured data is also presented in this communication

Spread spectrum techniques for indoor wireless IR communications

Multipath dispersion and fluorescent light interference are two major problems in indoor wireless infrared communications systems. Multipath dispersion introduces intersymhol interference at data rates above 10 Mb/s, while fluorescent light induces severe narrowband interference to baseband modulation schemes commonly used such as OOK and PPM. This article reviews the research into the application of direct sequence spread spectrum techniques to ameliorate these key channel impairments without having to resort to complex signal processing techniques. The inherent properties of a spreading sequence are exploited in order to combat the ISI and narrowband interference. In addition, to reduce the impact of these impairments, the DSSS modulation schemes have strived to be bandwidth-efficient and simple to implement. Three main DSSS waveform techniques have been developed and investigated. These are sequence inverse keying, complementary sequence inverse keying, and M-ary biorthogonal keying (MBOK). The operations of the three systems are explained; their performances were evaluated through simulations and experiments for a number of system parameters, including spreading sequence type and length. By comparison with OOK, our results show that SIK, CSIK, and MBOK are effective against multipath dispersion and fluorescent light interference becausc the penalties incurred on the DSSS schemes are between 0-7 dB, while the penalty on OOK in the same environment is more than 17 dB. The DSSS solution for IR wireless transmission demonstrates that a transmission waveform can he designed to remove the key channel impairments in a wireless IR system