Probabilistic Shaping for Wi-Fi 8

The IEEE 802.11 working group has formed a new Task Group, 802.11bn, to develop a new amendment to support ultra-high reliability (UHR) for Wi-Fi networks, which will eventually shape what Wi-Fi 8 will look like. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic shaping (PS) scheme to improve the spectrum and power efficiency in medium to high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime for Wi-Fi 8. The integration and compatibility with legacy Wi-Fi systems, as well as other Wi-Fi 8 candidate technologies like unequal modulation (UEQM) are addressed. An architecture with a single low-density parity-check (LDPC) encoder and multiple shaping encoders is devised to adapt to different qualities of spatial channels. Furthermore, we propose practical techniques to resolve issues like error propagation, scrambler re-synchronization, and packet length determination to ensure compatibility with legacy scrambling, subframe detection, and packaging flow. It is shown that the proposed constellation shaping scheme provides average 0.89 dB shaping gains over the legacy Wi-Fi scheme, and the shaping gains remain when UEQM and lifted LDPC are applied.