ASUS SpaceLink B&W PCI Card
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Chapter 6
Chapter 6 - Glossary
COFDM (for 802.11a)
Power alone is not enough to maintain 802.11b-like distances in an 802.11a
environment. To compensate, vendors specified and designed a new
physical-layer encoding technology that departs from the traditional direct-
sequence technology being deployed today. This technology is called
COFDM (coded OFDM). COFDM was developed specifically for indoor
wireless use and offers performance much superior to that of spread-
spectrum solutions. COFDM works by breaking one high-speed data carrier
into several lower-speed subcarriers, which are then transmitted in parallel.
Each high-speed carrier is 20 MHz wide and is broken up into 52
subchannels, each approximately 300 KHz wide. COFDM uses 48 of these
subchannels for data, while the remaining four are used for error correction.
COFDM delivers higher data rates and a high degree of multipath reflection
recovery, thanks to its encoding scheme and error correction.
Each subchannel in the COFDM implementation is about 300 KHz wide.
At the low end of the speed gradient, BPSK (binary phase shift keying) is
used to encode 125 Kbps of data per channel, resulting in a 6,000-Kbps, or
6 Mbps, data rate. Using quadrature phase shift keying, you can double the
amount of data encoded to 250 Kbps per channel, yielding a 12-Mbps data
rate. And by using 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation encoding 4
bits per hertz, you can achieve a data rate of 24 Mbps. The 802.11a standard
specifies that all 802.11a-compliant products must support these basic data
rates. The standard also lets the vendor extend the modulation scheme
beyond 24 Mbps. Remember, the more bits per cycle (hertz) that are
encoded, the more susceptible the signal will be to interference and fading,
and ultimately, the shorter the range, unless power output is increased.
