1

Energy Reduction Scheme in 802.11n

Physical Layer for MIMO System using
Space-Time Coding
ZhiJin WANG (RED ID: 809735310)
email:zwang@rohan.sdsu.edu
EE650 Modern Communications
Project Report, Fall 2006
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
San Diego State University
11/30/2006

Abstract

Emergence of mobile devices with WiFi (IEEE 802.11) interfaces such as notebook, WiFi-
cellular dual-mode phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and even WiFi cameras, allow users
to take full advantages of heterogeneous radio technologies. WiFi, however, was not originally
designed for energy constrained devices. As a result, the standby time of a mobile device with
a WiFi interface is significantly lower than what people typically expect. This project presents
and evaluates a physical layer power management scheme for devices with WiFi, to significantly
increase their standby time. In this project, power problems are solved in PHY layer in two aspects:
decrease number of MIMO antennas and switch to low energy modulation schemes. Simulations
demonstrated that the proposed power save scheme is applicable.

Index Terms

802.11n, WiFi, MIMO, Space-Time Coding, Engergy Reduction

I. I NTRODUCTION

The next generation WiFi standard, 802.11n is newly proposed which is not released until
July 2007. With MIMO (Multiple Input and Multiple Output) technique, the transmission rate
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TABLE I: WLAN STANDARDS

Standard Frequency Range Maximum Data Rate Channel BW Modulation
802.11a 5-5.825GHz 54Mbps 20MHz 52-OFDM, 64-QAM
802.11b 2.4-2.485GHz 11Mbps 20MHz DSSS/CCK, QPSK
802.11g 2.4-2.485GHz 54Mbps 20MHz OFDM, 64-QAM
802.11n 2.4-2.485GHz, 5-5.825GHz > 500Mbps 40MHz 114OFDM,256-QAM

TABLE II: Modulation Scheme and Data Rate

Data rate (Mbit/s) Modulation Coding rate Ndbps 1472 byte transfer duration (µs)
6 BPSK 1/2 24 2012
9 BPSK 3/4 36 1344
12 QPSK 1/2 48 1008
18 QPSK 3/4 72 672
24 16-QAM 1/2 96 504
36 16-QAM 3/4 144 336
48 64-QAM 2/3 192 252
54 64-QAM 3/4 216 224

of 802.11n standard is significantly increased from 11 or 54Mbps of 802.11a/b/g to more

than 400Mbps which is more suitable for multimedia applications, such as IPTV. However
with multiple antennas, the energy consumption is stronger than the previous standards. It
is necessary to use energy reduction methods to deploy the next generation WiFi on mobile
devices which are more popular now and in the future.
Paper [1] introduces a system-level energy conserving method in upper level of physical
layer. The advantage is that it does not care about the upper or under level issues. But it
could not solve the energy problems fundamentally.
In this project, a physical layer energy reduction scheme is proposed in 802.11n standard.
With this scheme, the power problems in mobile device with WiFi interfaces can be solved
fundamentally for the next generation WiFi standard. Power problems are solved in PHY layer
in two aspects: decrease number of MIMO antennas and switch to low energy modulation
schemes. Simulations demonstrated that the proposed power save scheme is applicable.
The comparision of WiFi standards are listed in Table I.
The comparision of modulation scheme and data rate is listed in Table II for SISO (Single
Input & Single Output).
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II. MIMO T ECHNIQUE IN 802.11 N S TANDARD

To achieve higher transfer rate in WLAN, one approach to employs multiple antenna
systems for both the transmitter and the receiver. This technology is referred to as multiple-
input multiple-output (MIMO), or smart antenna systems. MIMO exploits the use of multiple
signals transmitted into the wireless medium and multiple signals received from the wireless
medium to improve wireless performance [2].
With N antennas, the transfer rate can be increased N times theoretically. The basic two-
antenna MIMO system is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: Basic Two-antenna MIMO System

A. Channel Capacity and Data Rates

For an ’N’ number antenna system carrying equal power N-parallel independent data
streams, the Shannon’s channel capacity equation can be written as [4]:

C = BW × N × log2 (1 + Eb /N0 ), (1)

where BW is bandwidth, Eb /N0 is signal to noise ratio.

From this equation, by increasing BW or the number of antennas N, the channel capacity
can be increased proportionally.
Fig. 2 shows the variation of channel capacity C with the SNR Eb /N0 and the number of
antennas N.
Shannon’s channel capacity equation is the maximum channel capacity. However, in prac-
tice, this capacity is impossible to achieve due to the limited code rates and other factors.
The achievable data rate is

R = BW × N × Se , (2)
 4

9 Channel Capacity
x 10
4.5

N=1
4
N=2

N=3
3.5 N=4

N=8

Channel Capacity (bits/s/Hz) 3

2.5

1.5

0.5

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
Eb/N0

Fig. 2: Channel Capacity of MIMO System: BW=40MHZ

where Se is spectral efficiency. For a 64 QAM modulation with SNRs of around 25dB, the
spectral efficiency is log2 (64) = 6bps/HZ. When BW = 40MHZ and for a 2×2 MIMO, the
maximum channel capacity using Shannon’s capacity equation is approximately 580Mbps.
With additional error-code redundancy, preambles and training pilots, the achievable data rate
is around 70% of the total rate or 400Mbps.

B. Performance Analysis of MIMO System

Multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems use multiple transmitters and receivers
to improve performance. The performance of MIMO system with different antennas and
space-time coding will be analyzed in the simulation section to see if the probability P b vs.
Eb /N0 is acceptable. It is also the basis for energy reduction scheme proposed in this project.

III. S PACE T IME C ODING

To achieve dramatic diversity and multiplexing gains in MIMO wireless communication

systems, one way is to use space-time codes (STC) at the transmitter front end [5].
STCs rely on transmitting multiple and redundant copies of a data stream to the receiver
in the hope that at least some of them may survive the physical path between transmission
and reception in a good enough state to allow reliable decoding [6].
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Space time codes may be split into two main types:

SpaceCtime trellis codes (STTCs) distribute a trellis code over multiple antennas and
multiple time-slots and provide both coding gain and diversity gain.

SpaceCtime block codes (STBCs) act on a block of data at once (similarly to block codes)
and provide only diversity gain, but are much less complex in implementation terms than
STTCs. STBC is used in this project.

A. Space-Time Trellis Codes

Space-time trellis codes (STTCs) are a type of spaceCtime code used in multiple-antenna
wireless communications. This scheme transmits multiple, redundant copies of a trellis (or
convolutional) code distributed over time and a number of antennas (’space’). These multiple,
’diverse’ copies of the data are used by the receiver to attempt to reconstruct the actual
transmitted data. For a STC to be used, there must necessarily be multiple transmit antennas,
but only a single receive antennas is required; nevertheless multiple receive antennas are
often used since the performance of the system is improved by so doing.
In contrast to spaceCtime block codes (STBCs), they are able to provide both coding
gain and diversity gain and have a better bit-error rate performance. However, being based
on trellis codes, they are more complex than STBCs to encode and decode; they rely on a
Viterbi decoder at the receiver where STBCs need only linear processing.

B. Space-Time Block Codes

Space-time block code is a technique used in wireless communications to transmit multiple

copies of a data stream across a number of antennas and to exploit the various received
versions of the data to improve the reliability of data-transfer. The fact that transmitted data
must traverse a potentially difficult environment with scattering, reflection, refraction and so
on as well as be corrupted by thermal noise in the receiver means that some of the received
copies of the data will be ’better’ than others. This redundancy results in a higher chance
of being able to use one or more of the received copies of the data to correctly decode the
received signal. In fact, space-time coding combines all the copies of the received signal in
an optimal way to extract as much information from each of them as possible.
An STBC is usually represented by a matrix. Each row represents a time slot and each
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column represents one antenna’s transmissions over time:

⎡ ⎤
s11 s12 ... s1n
⎢ ⎥
⎢ s ⎥
⎢ 21 s 22 ... s 2n ⎥
⎢ . .. .. ⎥ , (3)
⎢ .. . . ⎥
⎣ ⎦
sT 1 sT 2 ... sT n
where sij is the modulated symbol to be transmitted in time slot i from antenna j. There are
to be T time slots and n transmit antennas as well as n receive antennas.
The code rate of an STBC measures how many symbols per time slot it transmits on
average over the course of one block. If a block encodes k symbols, the code rate is
k
r= . (4)
T
Only one standard STBC can achieve full rate r = 1, Alamouti
scode.

Encoding: Alamouti’s code

Alamouti invented the simplest of all the STBCs in 1998, although he did not coin the
term ”spaceCtime block code” himself. It was designed for a two-transmit antenna system
and has the coding matrix:
⎡ ⎤
s1 s2
C2 = ⎣ ⎦, (5)
−s∗2 s∗1
∗
where denotes complexconjugate.
It is readily apparent that this is a rate-1 code. It takes two time-slots to transmit two
symbols. Using the optimal decoding scheme discussed below, the bit-error rate (BER) of
this STBC is equivalent to 2n-branch maximal ratio combining (MRC). This is a result of the
perfect orthogonality between the symbols after receive processing. There are two copies
of each symbol transmitted and n copies received.
One particularly attractive feature of orthogonal STBCs is that maximum likelihood de-
coding can be achieved at the receiver with only linear processing. In order to consider a
decoding method, a model of the wireless communications system is needed.
At time t, the signal rtj received at antenna j is
j
n
rt = αij sit + njt , (6)
i=1

where αij is the path gain from transmit antenna i to receive antenna j and n jt is a sample
of AW GN .
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The maximum-likelihood detection rule [10] is to form the decision variables:


n 
n
Ri = rtj α
t (i)j δt (i), (7)
t=1 j=1

where δk (i) is the sign of si in the k th row of the coding matrix, k (p) = q denotes that sp
is the (k, q) element of the coding matrix, for i = 1, 2, ..., n and then decide on constellation
symbol si that satisfies

si = arg min |Ri − s|2 + (−1 + |αkl |2 )|s|2 , (8)
s∈A
k,l

where A is the constellation alphabet. This is a simple, linear decoding scheme that provides
maximal diversity.

IV. PSK & QAM

Phase shift keying (PSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) are two main
modulation schemes used in 802.11n systems.

A. PSK

PSK was developed during the early days of the deep-space program; PSK is now widely
used in both military and commercial communication systems [7]. The general analytic
expression for PSK is

2E
si (t) = cos[ω0 t + φi (t)], 0 ≤ t ≤ T, i = 1, 2, ..., M, (9)
T
where the phase term, φi (t), will have M discrete values, typically given by
2πi
φi (t) = , i = 1, 2, ..., M. (10)
M
The constellation diagram of QPSK with AWGN is shown in Fig. 3. The bit error probability
of coherent BPSK is

2Eb
Pb = Q( ). (11)
N0
For differential MPSK system in AWGN channel for M ≥ 4 is approximated by

4Es π
2Q( N0
sin( 2M ))
Pb = . (12)
log2 M
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1.5

0.5

−0.5

−1

−1.5
−1.5 −1 −0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5

Fig. 3: QPSK

B. QAM

In M-ary PSK modulation, the amplitude of the transmitted signal is constrained to remain
constant, thereby yielding a circular constellation. By allowing the amplitude to also vary
with the phase, a new modulation scheme called quadratureamplitudemodulation (QAM)
is obtained [8]. Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 show the constellation diagrams of the 16 QAM and 64
QAM with AWGN. 64QAM in after AWGN channel. The general form of an M-ary QAM
signal can be defined as
 
2Emin 2Emin
si (t) = ai cos(2πfc t) + bi sin(2πfc t), (13)
Ts Ts
where Emin is the energy of the signal with lowest amplitude, and a i and bi are a pair of
independent integers chosen according to the location of the particular signal point.
For a rectangular constellation, a Gaussian channel, and matched filter reception, the
probability of bit error is expressed by

2(1 − L−1 ) 3 log L 2Eb
Pb = Q[ ( 2 2 ) ]. (14)
log2 L L − 1 N0
(15)
 9

−1

−2

−3

−4

−5
−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4

Fig. 4: 16 QAM

10

−2

−4

−6

−8

−10
−10 −8 −6 −4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10

Fig. 5: 64 QAM
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V. E NERGY R EDUCTION S CHEME IN 802.11 N PHY LAYER

Mobile devices with WIFI interface in mobile communication system are becoming more
and more popular. By taking the advantages of 802.11 standard’s high transfer bit rate, it
is now applicable to apply multimedia implementations for mobile devices, such video on
demand (VOD), video RSS or HD online radio. 802.11n is the newest version of WIFI. It has
a much higher bit rate than previous versions. However, with multiple antenna, the energy
consumption speed is even faster than the old standards.
Power saving on mobile devices, such as laptop, PDA or WIFI phones is necessary. The
normal power save mode of 802.11 standard is that the stations or mobile devices will shut
down WIFI antenna(s) when the device is idle. This could not solve the power problems for
active WIFI mobile devices. In this project, a new power saving scheme is proposed to save
power while the mobile devices are active to boost battery life.

A. 802.11 Power Save Mode

The IEEE 802.11 [9] allows a wireless station to be in one of two different power states:
awake and doze. In the awake state, a wireless station is fully powered and is ready to
communicate with others at any time. In contrast, it consumes extremely low power in the
doze state but cannot transmit/receive packets or sense the wireless channel. Transition from
the doze state to the awake state takes a short duration of time, during which a wireless
station consumes significantly higher power than being in the steady awake state.
There are two different power-management modes for an 802.11 wireless station: AM
(Active Mode) or PSM (Power- Saving Mode). The AP (Access Point) keeps track of power
management modes for all the wireless stations in its cluster. It temporarily buffers the
packets that are destined for PSM stations, and transmits them only at designated times.
Every t Beacon Period, the AP transmits a Beacon frame, which carries a TIM (Traffic
Indication Map) indicating the buffer status of all the PSM stations in its cluster.
A PSM station stays in the doze state for most of time and only wakes up to listen for
selected Beacon frames with a fixed wakeup interval. For this reason, we call the current
802.11 PSM a static scheme. If the TIM carried in a Beacon frame indicates the presence
of buffered packets for a station, it stays awake and issues PS-Poll frames to retrieve the
buffered packets, one at a time, until all the packets are received; otherwise, the station goes
back to sleep. On the other hand, if a PSM station itself wants to initiate a transmission, it
may wake up at any time to do so without waiting for a Beacon frame. In contrast, an AM
 11

station always stays in the awake state, and hence, the AP transmits/relays the packets that
are destined for AM stations directly without any extra delay.
Moreover, if there is any PSM station in its cluster, the AP buffers the broadcast/multicast
packets, and transmits them immediately following a Beacon frame containing a special
Delivery TIM (DTIM). The Beacon frames containing DTIMs are transmitted every t DTIM
Period, which is a multiple of Beacon periods. Note that a PSM station is allowed to skip
DTIM announcements if it is not interested in receiving broadcast/multicast packets.

B. Proposed Energy Reduction Scheme

The energy reduction can be accomplished in the following steps:

• Decrease number of MIMO antennas
If battery of mobile device is used instead of AC power or battery power is low, then
shut down antennas from 8 to 4 or to 2 or to 1 antenna(s) to save power.
• Switch to low energy consumption modulations, such as using QPSK or BPSK instead of
16QAM or 64QAM or 256QAM.
With the same required Pb , BPSK or QPSK has less SNR or Eb /N0 than 16QAM or
64QAM. That means energy is saved with BPSK or QPSK with the sacrifice of transfer
rate. When battery power is low, it is necessary to switch the modulation scheme from
QAM to PSK with the lower data transmission rate to conserve energy.

VI. S IMULATION R ESULTS

In this project, the energy reduction method is evaluated with different numbers of MIMO
atennas and different modulation schemes, such as BPSK, QPSK and QAMs (16 and 64).
The simulation tool is Matlab.
The bit error probability Pb diagrams will also be plotted to compare different modulation
schemes, to decide which is the better scheme for energy conservation.

A. Probability of Bit Errors for Multi-Antenna MIMO System

The simulation result of bit error probability (P b ) vs. SNR (Eb /N0 ) for MIMO system is
shown in Fig. 6.
From this figure, we can see that the performance of 2-antenna MIMO is better than the one
with 1-antenna MIMO system. Both the performances of BPSK and QPSK with 2-antennas
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0
10
N=1,BPSK
N=1,QPSK
−1 N=2,BPSK
10
Pb: Bit Error Probability N=2,QPSK

−2
10

−3
10

−4
10

−5
10

−6
10
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Eb/N0, [dB]

Fig. 6: Bit Error Prob. vs. Eb /N0 for MIMO

are much better than the performances of BPSK and QPSK with 1-antenna. The performance
of BPSK is always much better than QPSK.
With Pb = 10−3 , the Eb /N0 are about 6dB and 9.5dB for BPSK and QPSK respectively
for antenna number N = 2; the Eb /N0 are about 11dB and 15dB for BPSK and QPSK
respectively for antenna number N = 1 with the same prob. of bit error.
However the power consumption is nearly twice of the one of the 1-antenna MIMO system
with equal power allocation. So when battery power is low, it is necessary to shutdown some
antennas and use only one antenna with about half of the transfer rate.

B. Probability of Bit Errors for SISO System

The bit error probability Pb vs. Eb /N0 for different modulation schemes is shown in Fig.
7
With Pb = 10−3 , the Eb /N0 are about 9dB, 9.7dB, 16dB and 19dB for BPSK, QPSK,
16QAM and 64QAM respectively. From this figure, we know that when the battery power
is low, the mobile device can change the modulation scheme from higher data rate to lower
data rate. Thus the device can decrease the SNR to save power while maintaining the same
probability of bit error.
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−1
10
BPSK
QPSK
16QAM
64QAM

−2
10
Pb(Log)

−3
10

−4
10
0 5 10 15 20 25
Eb/N0(dB)

Fig. 7: Bit Error Prob. vs. Eb /N0 for Modulation Schemes

C. Energy Reduction and Transfer Rate

It is easy to understand that shuting down some antennas can save power. Now the power
saving scheme by switching between modulation methods is analyzed for SISO system in
this part of the project.
Fig. 8 shows the power needed for different modulation schemes with P b = 10−3 .
This figure shows that when switching from 64QAM to QPSK, the device can save about
50% of power with about 67% of the data rate. It is quite reasonable using low power
modulation scheme with low data rate to extend battery life.
Fig.9 shows the ideal data rates with BW = 40MHZ and code rate 1/2.

VII. C ONCLUSION AND A PPLICATIONS

Mobile Devices with WiFi interfaces are becoming more and more popular. 802.11n is a
newly proposed WiFi standard in which energy reduction is not considered. In this project,
power problems are solved in PHY layer in two aspects: decrease number of MIMO antennas
and switch to low energy modulation schemes. Simulations demonstrated that the proposed
power save scheme is applicable.
 14

20

18

16

14

12
dB

10

0
1 2 3 4
BPSK QPSK 16QAM 64QAM

Fig. 8: Power Needed for Modulations with P b = 10−3

120

100

80
Data Rate (Mbps)

60

40

20

0
1 2 3 4
BPSK QPSK 16QAM 64QAM

Fig. 9: Ideal Data Rate for Modulations with BW = 40MHZ

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R EFERENCES

[1] T. Zhang, S. Madhani and P. Gurung, ”Reducing Energy Consumption on Mobile Devices with WiFi Interfaces”,
Global Telecommunications Conference, 2005. GLOBECOM ’05. IEEE,” Volume 1, Dec. 2005 Page(s):5 pp.
[2] http://www.deviceforge.com/articles/AT5096801417.html
[3] I. Lee, J. Son and S. Lee, ”Fast Automatic Gain Control Employing Two Compensation Loop for High Throughput
MIMO-OFDM Receivers”, Circuits and Systems, 2006. ISCAS 2006. Proceedings. 2006 IEEE International Symposium
on May 2006 Page(s):4 pp.
[4] C. Garuda, M. Ismail, ”A multi-standard OFDM-MIMO transceiver for WLAN applications,” Circuits and Systems,
2005. 48th Midwest Symposium on Aug. 2005, Vol. 2, Page(s):1613 - 1616
[5] B., Varadarajan, J.R. Barry, ”The outage capacity of linear space-time codes,” Wireless Communications, IEEE
Transactions on Volume 4, Issue 6, Nov. 2005 Page(s):2642 - 2648.
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time code.
[7] B. Sklar, ”Digital Communications, Fundamentals and Applications, 2nd” Prentice Hall, 2001.
[8] T. Rappaport, ”Wireless Communications, Principles and Practice, 2nd” Prentice Hall, 2002.
[9] ”IEEE 802.11, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications,”
Aug. 1999.
[10] V. Tarokh, H. Jafarkhani and A. Robert, ”Space-time block coding for wireless communications: performance results,”
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Calderbank, March 1999, vol 17 (3): 451C460.