Performance analysis of the effect of pulse-noise interference on WLAN signals transmitted over a Nakagami fading channel

The paper examines the performance of wireless local area network (WLAN) systems, specifically, IEEE 802.11a systems. The signal is subject to pulsed-noise jamming, when the desired signal and the jamming signal are subject to Nakagami fading. We assume that the average jamming power is much greater than the AWGN power. As expected, the implementation of forward error correction (FEC) coding with soft decision decoding (SDD) and maximum-likelihood detection improves performance as compared to uncoded signals. For uncoded signals, a jamming signal that experiences fading actually improves performance when the fading parameter of the information signal, m_s, is less than or equal to one. Surprisingly, for larger values of m_s, a jamming signal that experiences fading works in favor of the information signal only for small signal-to-interference ratio (SIR). When SIR is large, performance when the jamming signal experiences fading is worse relative to performance when the jamming signal does not experience fading. For error correction coding with SDD, we investigate only continuous jamming since it is by far the worst case. Moreover, while we consider a range of fading conditions for the jamming signal, we examine only Rayleigh fading of the information signal. The coded signal, when the jamming signal experiences severe fading, performs better relative to the case when the jamming signal does not experience fading.