Low-cost encoding of IEEE 802.11n

Abstract

A low-cost encoder for the 802.11n standard is presented. Recent standards such as 802.16e or 802.11n include a special parity check matrix structure that allows efficient encoding and decoding. However, the hardware requirements for implementation with fully parallel architectures could be high. Described is a way of encoding low density parity check (LDPC) codes, with parity check matrices under the schemes used in the 802.11n or 802.16e standards, in a serial way. Exploiting the special topology of these standards’ parity matrix, the encoder proposed requires about 12 times less hardware than a fully parallel one, while only increasing the time between input frames by about three times.