Abstract
Wireless local area network (WLAN) are now becoming a viable alternative to traditional wired solutions, due to the advantage of ease of installation and mobility. IEEE 802.11a is a high-rate WLAN standard, based on the popular orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology. In this thesis we manage to combine frequency, timing, and frame synchronization plus channel estimation and detection based on the 802.11a standard. The channel considered is a multipath channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and is assumed to be quasi-static. Based on the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion, we have derived estimator algorithms to conduct the above mentioned synchronization tasks. Jointly with previous proposed channel estimation and combined detection/decoding algorithms, an entire baseband receiver has been obtained. Simulation results show that our baseband receiver performs similarly as those previously proposed best methods, but requires lower complexity.