A robust beamforming scheme with low power and complexity for IEEE 802.11n systems

Due to the extremely increased interference of multiple-input multiple-output systems, designing efficient transmit beamforming schemes is significant to degrade the interference. A novel beamforming scheme is addressed by incorporating a multiple hypothesis testing problem with the characteristics of the wireless channel. The proposed beamforming scheme is operated by the implicit beamforming protocol in the IEEE 802.11n standard. From the simulation results, it is confirmed that the proposed scheme has high SNR gain. The proposed beamforming scheme is implemented in Toshiba 40nm low power process and shows a gate count of only 33K and power consumption of 3.39mW. Field test results show that the maximum increase of the data rate with the proposed scheme is about 42 percent and the increase of coverage with the proposed scheme is 85 percent, while maintaining the robustness of incorrect channel state information.