Power Loading : Candidate for Future WLANs?

IEEE 802.11ac WLANs propose the use of 80and 160MHz bandwidths. Over such bandwidths the largefrequency variability of the channel motivates the dynamic allo-cation of resources per OFDM subcarrier. In this work we focuson power adaptation (power loading). Besides physical layerperformance analysis, we account for protocol overhead and forpractical implementation issues in WLANs. In particular, weconsider the exploitation of coherence time in 80MHz TGacindoor channels trading-off algorithm accuracy for channelestimation overhead. We further study the trade-off betweenalgorithm performance and computational complexity to con-clude that optimal solutions do not necessarily perform betterthan sub-optimal low-complex ones. We show thatpurepowerloading provides only a modest performance gain compared tostatic schemes and propose power loading combined with thedeactivation of highly attenuated subcarriers as a candidateapproach for improving WLAN.QC 20131217