Enhancing IEEE 802.11a/n with dynamic single-user OFDM adaptation

Earlier paper have demonstrated that the achievable throughput of OFDM systems can benefit significantly from individual modulation/transmit power selection on a per sub-carrier basis according to the actual gain of individual sub-carriers (so called dynamic OFDM scheme). Usage of such an approach requires, however, providing support for additional functionalities such as: acquisition of the sub-carrier gains, signaling of the modulation types used between sender and receiver, etc. Therefore dynamic OFDM is actively pursued for future radio interfaces, rather than considered as extension of existing OFDM based standards. In this paper we introduce a proposal on how the widely accepted IEEE 802.11a/g systems as well as the emerging IEEE 802.11n system might be extended to support the dynamic OFDM in a single-user (point-to-point) setting. The presented approach guarantees backward compatibility to legacy devices. We address these issues by presenting (a) a set of protocol modifications required to incorporate dynamic OFDM in 802.11a/g/n; and (b) a performance evaluation of the suggested extension (referred to further on as single-user 802.11 DYN mode). Although 802.11n already includes advanced MAC and PHY features, i.e., frame aggregation and MIMO transmissions, our performance evaluation demonstrates that a further improvement is achievable by incorporating dynamic OFDM.