BER Improvement of Wireless LAN IEEE 802.11 Standard Using Wavelet Packet Transforms

High data rates and spectral efficiency is the main requirements for wireless communication systems. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a special form of multi carrier transmission used to achieve high data rates of the various WLAN standards. WLAN uses an Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) at the transmitter to modulate a high bit-rate signal onto a number of carriers and ensure orthogonality between the carriers. The FFT-OFDM has a disadvantage that it is inherently inflexible and requires a complex IFFT core. Recently, Wavelet Packet Transform is proposed as an alternate to FFT. It is a multiplexing method in which data is assigned to wavelet sub bands having different time and frequency resolutions. This paper presents a BER analysis of Fourier-based OFDM (FFT-OFDM) and Wavelet Packet based OFDM (WPT-OFDM) in WLAN standard (IEEE 802.11a). The performance of FFT and WPT OFDM for various modulation techniques such as PSK, DPSK and QAM for varying values of M was evaluated in AWGN Channel.