Capacity and Coverage Enhancements of MIMO WLANs in Realistic Environments

Recently, there has been an explosion of growth in research on MIMO systems, but little has been published characterising performance in realistic environments. This paper quantifies the performance of MIMO WLANs in outdoor environments, and compares performance between spatial multiplexing and space time block coding processing approaches. Packet Error Rate (PER) and throughput performance results are presented under different channel conditions. A WLAN physical layer simulator employing MIMO techniques and a propagation modelling tool are combined in order to evaluate the coverage and throughput enhancements of WLANs for the 2×2 and 4×4 MIMO cases.