Throughput improvement in interference limited multipath environments using a smart antenna for IEEE 802.11b WLAN

Author

Ahn, Minsik ; Kim, Dongsu ; Kenney, J. Stevenson

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA, USA

fYear

2004

fDate

19-22 Sept. 2004

Firstpage

411

Lastpage

414

Abstract

The results of throughput performance improvement from a ferroelectric smart antenna used in conjunction with a WLAN network interface card is presented in this paper. A two-element beamforming network was designed and implemented using ferroelectric phase shifters. The point in the radiation pattern of the two element antenna was scanned using control software so that undesired incoming interference signals could be rejected, resulting in improved SNR for the downlink. The resulting improvement in throughput afforded by this smart antenna was compared with that of a conventional switched diversity antenna for both indoor and outdoor channels under both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight propagation environments. The smart antenna system shows better performance in terms of data throughput rate and range extension to the access point.

Keywords

IEEE standards; UHF phase shifters; UHF radio propagation; adaptive antenna arrays; antenna radiation patterns; array signal processing; data communication; ferroelectric devices; indoor radio; interference suppression; mobile computing; multipath channels; network interfaces; packet radio networks; wireless LAN; IEEE 802.11b; SNR; WLAN; access point range extension; data throughput rate; ferroelectric phase shifters; ferroelectric smart antenna; indoor channels; interference limited multipath environments; interference signal rejection; line-of-sight propagation; network interface card; nonline-of-sight propagation; outdoor channels; performance; radiation pattern point; two element antenna; two-element beamforming network; Antenna radiation patterns; Antennas and propagation; Array signal processing; Downlink; Ferroelectric materials; Interference; Network interfaces; Phase shifters; Throughput; Wireless LAN;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Radio and Wireless Conference, 2004 IEEE

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8451-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RAWCON.2004.1389163

Filename

1389163