Re: limits of 802.11b sensitivity

Jim Thompson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.wireless.bay-area
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Aug 5, 2004, at 12:36 PM, Daniel Dobkin wrote:

> Folks:
>
> I'm not quite sure who was doing the calculation but...
>
> << Theoretical receive sensitivity can be calculated as:
>>
>> Receive sensitivity = Nt + Ns + SNRmin
>>
>> where  Nt is the thermal noise floor,  Ns is the system noise figure,
>> and SNRmin is the minimum SNR required for a given bit-error rate.
>>
>> 802.11b's CCK requires a SNR of about 10dB to decode frames with a FER
>> of 0.08. (We'll leave SIR and/or SINR out of the discussion unless
>> someone insists.)  We'll call this SNRmin.
> >>
>
> The required channel (S/N) for CCK11 to achieve a packet error rate of 
> 0.08 is about 7 dB, not 10 dB  [source:  fig 2.16 of "Evolution of 2.4 
> GHz Wireless LANs", Heegard et. al., in "Wireless Local Area 
> Networks", ed. Bing, Wiley 2003].

Perhaps in theory.    I urge you to check the documentation on the 
baseband in use on this card.   It is (ahem) much closer to the figure 
I used.

> The noise effective bandwidth of the 802.11 signal is also closer to 
> 16 MHz rather than the 22 MHz needed to incorporate all the power.  
> The thermal noise floor is thus about -101 dBm.

I'm willing to deal with -101dBm as a thermal noise floor.

Jim


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