Impacts of multipath fading on the timing synchronization of IEEE 802.11a wireless LANs

The timing-synchronization performance of IEEE 802.11a wireless LANs on multipath Rician fading channels is investigated. Simulation results yield the following observations. A higher Rician factor gives a better performance. At low signal-to-noise conditions, the multipath-diversity gain enables an improvement in the synchronization performance but at high signal-to-noise conditions, irreducible probabilities of synchronization failure, which cannot be reduced even if the signal power is increased, occur. A more dispersive channel gives a poorer synchronization performance, and the performance is poor for Rayleigh-fading environments.