IEEE 802.11ac: A performance evaluation with lattice-based MMSE and zero forcing MIMO OFDM receivers

The IEEE 802.11ac amendment approved by the end of 2013 allows physical (PHY) layer data rates up to 7 Gbps in the 5 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, while the IEEE 801.11n amendment specifies a maximum PHY layer data rate of 540 Mbps in 2.4 and 5 GHz ISM bands. In this paper, simulation results of the IEEE 802.11ac PHY layer show that the implementation of linear lattice reduction minimum mean squared error (LR-MMSE) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector presents a highly superior performance in relation to linear plain MMSE MIMO detector. Effects of bandwidth, channel models, modulation cardinality and number of antennas on the 802.11ac system performance are taken into account in the comparative performance evaluation between LR-MMSE and plain MMSE MIMO detectors. IEEE 802.11ac simulation results also show that, even with the application of LR techniques to obtain a subspace channel bases with lower cross-correlation among the independent linear vectors, LR-MMSE MIMO detectors have a superior performance in relation to LR zero-forcing (LR-ZF) MIMO detectors.