Throughput And Coverage Of Wlans Employing Stbc Under Different Channel Conditions

HIPERLAN/2 and 802.11a/g WLANs employ Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM) to provide data rates of up to 54 Mbps in a 20MHz bandwidth. In this paper, space-time block coding (STBC) techniques are considered as a means of enhancing the performance of COFDM WLANs. Packet Error Rate (PER) and throughput performance results are presented under different channel conditions. A WLAN physical layer simulator employing STBC and a propagation modelling tool are combined in order to evaluate the coverage and throughput of hot spot WLANs employing STBC for the 2x2 and 4x4 MIMO cases. Results showed that STBC can provide good performance, even at high K factors and under correlated channels. Throughput is significantly enhanced throughout the environment when STBC are employed.