The effect of delay spread on the BER performance of indoor personal communications systems

There is increasing interest in providing local access to the public network by radio methods. A major problem is designing digital mobile personal radio systems arises from radio propagation effects, which may significantly impair the overall transmission quality through intersymbol interference (ISI), and restrict the data transmission rate. The characteristics of the mobile multipath channel vary for different operating environments. In this paper, a numerical method (Gauss quadrature rule) and computer simulations have been employed to examine the effect of delay spread of an indoor multipath channel on the bit error rate (BER) performance. As a benchmark BPSK, QPSK and MSK modulation schemes were used and the BER was examined as a function of channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for different transmission rates. To enhance the error performance, selection combining (SC) space diversity was included in the investigations. Our findings yield an insight into the limitations in transmission rate for the indoor environment