LLR Metrics for 16K-QAM Soft-Decision: Implementation in IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8)

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 Ultra High Reliability (UHR) Study Group (SG) was created in July 2022 to develop the 802.11bn amendment (Wi-Fi 8). It aims to deliver a maximum aggregate throughput of at least 100 Gbps measured at medium access control (MAC) service access point (SAP) with low latency and high reliability. This allows supporting advanced services, such as extended reality/virtual reality, metaverse, robotics [1]. In this paper, aiming to increase the physical layer (PHY) throughput, it is derived and validated low-complexity log-likelihood ratio (LLR) metrics suitable for soft-decoding rectangular Gray-coding 16K-QAM scheme with either binary convolutional codes (BCC) or low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes.