Throughput and coverage of WLANs employing STBC under different channel conditions

HIPERLAN/2 and 802.11a/g WLANs employ coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM) to provide data rates of up to 54 Mbps in a 20 MHz bandwidth. In this paper, space-time block coding (STBC) techniques are considered as a means of enhancing the performance of COFDM WLANs. Packet error rate (PER) and throughput performance results are presented under different channel conditions. A WLAN physical layer simulator employing STBC and a propagation modelling tool are combined in order to evaluate the coverage and throughput of hot spot WLANs employing STBC for the 2×2 and 4×4 MIMO cases. Results showed that STBC can provide good performance, even at high K factors and under correlated channels. Throughput is significantly enhanced throughout the environment when STBC are employed.