Selected Papers by Melbourne Barton

Personal access communications system (PACS) is a 2 GHz band personal communications services (PCS) standard that supports 32 kbps wireless access services for fixed and mobile subscribers. This paper presents a physical layer architecture, and evaluates the performance, of a multicarrier PACS (MPACS) system based on a combination of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and time division multiple access (TDMA) technologies. It supports nominal user data rates of 32-256 kbps at distances beyond the current range of PACS. For shorter ranges, higher-speed extensions up to 768 kbps are incorporated in the design.

A personal communications services (PCS) system that provides access to, and interworks with, the ATM network will have the capability to support future multimedia services. PCS access to fixed ATM networks is one of the wireless access scenarios being considered by the ATM Forum for standardization. This paper provides a system level description of a PCS-to-ATM interworking scenario. It proposes a variable-rate forward error correction (FEC) coding scheme for the wireless physical (PHY) layer that is based on rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) coding. Through numerical analysis, using a two-ray Rayleigh fading channel model, it is shown that RCPC coding at the wireless PHY layer can be effective in providing reliable PCS access to the ATM infrastructure network. RCPC coding at the wireless PHY can be augmented with ARQ at the data link control layer (DLC) to form a hybrid ARQ/FEC protocol.

Variable rate error protection is required to support the broad range of quality of service (QoS) requirements for multimedia ser- vices in future Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-based wireless networking systems known as wireless ATM (WATM). In this paper, the performance of a rate-compatible punctured convolution (RCPC) coding scheme is examined. It provides adaptive forward error correc- tion (FEC) at the physical (PHY) layer of the (non-ATM) wireless ac- cess segment, that interworks with the fixed ATM transport network. Bit error rate (BER) performance of the RCPC codes is evaluated for a range of wireless protocol data unit (PDU) formats. The through- put is also compared with well known Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) and Reed-Solomon (RS) block codes. An hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ)/FEC protocol that uses RCPC coding to dis- tribe error protection between the wireless PHY and data link control (DLC) layers is also presented. Issues relating to complexity/cost trade-off, and effects of multipath fading, require further study.