Implementation of a high performance wireless LAN

A system is presented that implements an indoor microwave LAN that approaches the performance of fibre optic LANs. The goal of the system is to produce a bit rate of 150 Mbit/s with a bit error rate of 10^-12 in a 30 m cell. The high bit rate is achieved by combining hundreds of low speed signals with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) so that no channel equalization is required. The low bit error rate is achieved through a combination of antenna diversity and coding. Results from a prototype network are presented. The paper also discusses the physical layer of the network and begins with a brief description of the difficulties of sending high speed data through a multipath radio channel