Design and sensitivity analysis of direct conversion RF receiver for IEEE 802.11a WLAN system at 5.8 GHz frequency

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a direct conversion RF receiver and its sensitivity performance analysis for WLAN point to point communication at 5.8 GHz band based on IEEE 802.11a standard. The direct conversion RF receiver has been designed with proper selection of RF sub-components such as low noise amplifier (LNA), RF amplifier, power divider and filter. The selected RF sub-components of the RF receiver have been further analyzed for sensitivity performance in simulation. It is shown that the system noise figure influences RF receiver's sensitivity. It is contributed by the first stage of RF subcomponent which is LNA in the RF front-end system. As results, the 1.31 dB system noise figure has been selected in order to get the best sensitivity for direct conversion RF receiver which is -74 dBm and dynamic range of 47 dB at 54 Mbps. Besides, this direct conversion RF receiver has met sensitivity specification for all data rates based on the IEEE 802.11a standard.

An Investigation on the Use of Itu-R P.1411-7 in 802.11N Path Loss Modelling

“…A 20 MHz signal bandwidth was used as channel bandwidth. Figure 2 shows that the average collected received signal strength [14] for all the test locations at all distances was significantly lower than that estimated using Free Space Receive Power Model. The margin between the estimated free space loss and actual 802.11n signal strength is approximately 30 dB.…”