Low power synchronization design for large bandwidth wireless LAN systems

Wireless LAN systems have been continuously evolving to provide ~10X increase in data rates every five years, exploiting higher mmWave frequencies and larger bandwidths, such as IEEE 802.11ad, providing 6.76 Gb/s using 2.16 GHz of bandwidth at 60 GHz. One of the key technical challenges to successful commercialization of these large bandwidth systems is power consumption. In this paper, we focus on reducing the idle listening mode power consumption where the device is actively looking for packets and the power consumption is dominated by the high speed ADCs. We propose a low power and bandwidth-scalable synchronization design for large bandwidth systems by developing reduced bandwidth modes in high-speed ADCs used in such systems. We study the impact of the proposed synchronization design on the detection probability, false alarm, AGC design and symbol timing estimation. Comparisons of our design using a bandwidth reduction of 4 with the existing IEEE 802. Had synchronization design show no loss in AWGN and a 0.8 dB loss in fading for an equivalent acquisition time and false alarm rate while providing a 33% power reduction in idle mode, assuming the ADCs consume 50% of the total idle power consumption. We also provide backward compatibility with current IEEE 802.11ad systems with limited impact on performance and power consumption.