Outdoor BLAST measurement system at 2.44 GHz: calibration and initial results

There are ever increasing demands for additional capacity in wireless communications to handle voice, data, and wideband Internet applications. These demands are constrained by the bandwidth that was allocated to wireless communications. The spectral efficiencies in present day wireless systems hover around 1 bit/s/Hz. Bell-labs Layered Space-Time (BLAST) is a communication technique for achieving very high spectral efficiencies in highly scattering environments using multiple transmit and receive antennas. A measurement campaign was undertaken to assess the BLAST gains in spectral efficiency in the suburban outdoor environment for stationary subscribers. The measurements employed directive antennas to better control interference from adjacent cells. The measurements were performed over a narrow band at 2.44 GHz with five transmitting and seven receiving antennas, respectively. Extensive calibration methods, assisted by simulations, were developed to assure accurate results for the BLAST capacities of the measured remote subscriber sites. Initial results indicate that BLAST capacities of C _B⩾38 bits/s/Hz at 20% of the measured locations and C_B⩾24 bits/s/Hz at 50% of these locations are feasible, for reasonable link parameters and negligible interference