Experimental investigation of fractional sampling in IEEE802.11a WLAN system

In the IEEE802.11a WLAN standard, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is employed. Diversity techniques are usually utilized to overcome fading channels in OFDM systems. Furthermore, a diversity technique with one antenna is desirable because the form factor of the terminal is important. Fractional sampling (FS) scheme is one of the diversity techniques with a single antenna. Through FS, it is possible to separate multipath components and obtain diversity gain in OFDM communication. However, an experimental investigation of FS has not been carried out. In this paper, the FS scheme on a IEEE802.11a WLAN system is evaluated through an experiment. Especially, the BER performances with line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) situations are compared. Numerical results through the experiment indicate that the FS can achieve path diversity.