openofdm/docs/source/detection.rst

Packet Detection
================

802.11 OFDM packets start with a short PLCP Preamble sequence to help the
receiver detect the beginning of the packet. The short preamble duration is
8 us. At 20 MSPS sampling rate, it contains 10 repeating sequence of 16 I/Q
samples, or 160 samples in total. The short preamble also helps the receiver
for coarse frequency offset correction , which will be discussed separately in
:ref:`freq_offset`.


Power Trigger
-------------

- **Module**: ``power_trigger.v``
- **Input**: ``sample_in`` (16B I + 16B Q), ``sample_in_strobe`` (1B)
- **Output**: ``trigger`` (1B)
- **Setting Registers**: ``SR_POWER_THRES``, ``SR_POWER_WINDOW``,
  ``SR_SKIP_SAMPLE``.

The core idea of detecting the short preamble is to utilize its repeating nature
by calculating the auto correlation metric. But before that, we need to make sure
we are trying to detect short preamble from "meaningful" signals. One example of
"un-meaningful" signal is constant power levels, whose auto correlation metric
is also very high (nearly 1) but obviously does not represent packet beginning.

The first module in the pipeline is the ``power_trigger.v``. It takes the I/Q
samples as input and asserts the ``trigger`` signal during a potential packet
activity. Optionally, it can be configured to skip the first certain number of
samples before detecting a power trigger. This is useful to skip the spurious
signals during the intimal hardware stabilization phase.

The logic of the ``power_trigger`` module is quite simple: after skipping
certain number of initial samples, it waits for significant power increase and
triggers the ``trigger`` signal upon detection. The ``trigger`` signal is
asserted until the power level is smaller than a threshold for certain number of
continuous samples.

Short Preamble Detection
------------------------

- **Module**: ``sync_short.v``
- **Input**: ``sample_in`` (16B I + 16B Q), ``sample_in_strobe`` (1B)
- **Output**: ``short_preamble_detected`` (1B)
- **Setting Registers**: ``SR_MIN_PLATEAU``


.. _fig_short_preamble:
.. figure:: /images/short_preamble.png
    :align: center

    In-Phase of Short Preamble.

:numref:`fig_short_preamble` shows the in-phase of the beginning of a packet.
Some repeating patterns can clearly be seen. We can utilize this characteristic
and calculate the auto correlation metric of incoming signals to detect such
pattern:

.. math::

    corr[i] = \frac{\left\lVert\sum_{i=0}^{N}{S[i]*\overline{S[i+16]}}\right\rVert}
    {\sum_{i=0}^{N}{S[i]*\overline{S[i]}}}

where :math:`S[i]` is the :math:`\langle I,Q \rangle` sample expressed as a
complex number, and :math:`\overline{S[i]}` is its conjugate, :math:`N` is the
correlation window size. The correlation
reaches 1 if the incoming signal is repeating itself every 16 samples. If the
correlation stays high for certain number of continuous samples, then a short
preamble can be declared.

.. _fig_corr:
.. figure:: /images/corr.png
    :align: center

    Auto Correlation of the Short Preamble samples (N=48).

:numref:`fig_corr` shows the auto correlation value of the samples in
:numref:`fig_short_preamble`. We can see that the correlation value is almost 1
during the short preamble period, but drops quickly after that. We can also see
that for the very first 20 samples or so, the correlation value is also very
high. This is because the silence also repeats itself (at arbitrary interval)!
That's why we first use the ``power_trigger`` module to detect actual packet
activity and only perform short preamble detection on non-silent samples.

A straight forward implementation would require
both multiplication and division. However, on FPGAs devision consumes a lot of
resources so we really want to avoid it. In current implementation, we use a
fixed threshold (0.75) for the correlation so that we can use bit-shift to
achieve the purpose. In particular, we calculate ``numerator>>1 + numerator>>2``
and compare that with the denominator. For the correlation window size, we set
:math:`N=16`.


.. _fig_sync_short:

.. figure:: /images/sync_short.png
    :align: center

    ``sync_short`` Module Diagram

:numref:`fig_sync_short` shows the internal module diagram of the ``sync_short``
module. In addition to the number of consecutive samples with correlation
larger than 0.75, the ``sync_short`` module also checks if the incoming signal
has both positive (> 25%) and negative (> 25%) samples to further eliminate
false positives (e.g., when the incoming signals are constant non-zero values).
Again, the thresholds (25%) are chosen so that we can use only bit-shifts for
the calculation.