Robust transmission of 802.11n physical packet headers

This paper concerns the robust transmission of physical header frames of the IEEE 802.11n wireless network standard over a noisy channel. The proposed receiver is based on an iterative decoding scheme using the turbo principle where two blocks are serially concatenated. The outer block provides soft input soft output estimates of the headers of the physical packets based on a MAP estimation, while the inner block is some classical BCJR encoding of the channel code. The method relies on a strategy proposed recently by the same team, making use of the inherent redundancies of the physical layer headers. This paper proposed an implementation and evaluation in which the channel coding is taken into account. Two cases are studied: (i) the fully general framework of the 802.11n physical layer; and (ii) a specific industrial implementation of the 802.11n physical layer network, which, like most implementations, does not allow all options of the standard. Simulations show that the proposed receiver allows to reduce drastically the number of errors occurring during the transmission compared to a classical hard decision technique.