System throughput and immunity analysis of a 802.11n WLAN in a large reverberation chamber

The paper presents some results concerning the use of a reverberation chamber (RC) to test a wireless local area network (WLAN) system based on 802.11n standard. The whole link (root and non-root bridge) operates inside the RC under different chamber loading conditions and varying the stirrer rotating speed. The effects of this multipath environment on system performances are checked measuring three transmission quality estimators: the ping average round trip time, the number of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error, and the number of data retries. The behavior of these parameters is also analyzed changing the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) index using both one spatial stream and two spatial streams (MIMO). The same RC is used to carry out a radiated immunity test. The undesired signal is both a modulated and continuous wave injected into the active channel and into adjacent channels. The modulated wave is that prescribed by the IEC 61000-4-3 standard. Results reveal the high robustness of the 802.11n standard with respect to b and g standards when it operates in a hostile environment reproduced by an RC.