Performance analysis of 802.11n wireless LAN physical layer

In the last few years, we have seen an explosive growth of wireless LAN deployments in both the business and consumer environments. The latest WLAN standard, currently in draft version, is labeled 802.11n. It is based on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology combined with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). MIMO is concerned with spatial diversity and Space-Time Block Coding techniques, which distribute the data signal over several transmit and receive antennas to increase the raw PHY layer data rates to near 600 Mbps, and/or significantly enhance performance in terms of bit error rate (BER). Hence we have set our goals in this research to simulate an 802.1 In system in a fading channel, compare the performance of different MIMO modes and channel bandwidths, and study replacing the standard convolutional encoder.