Performance of MR antenna systems in IEEE 802.11ac network

The use of multifunctional and reconfigurable (MR) antennas for wireless systems has recently gathered remarkable attention. Most of the work so far on such antenna systems have either been theoretical and/or simulation based. In this work, we establish a test bed made up of off-the-shelf commercial IEEE 802.11n/ac wireless routers integrated with the parasitic layer MR antennas designed for operation at 5 GHz. To that end, a commercial TP Link Archer C7 wireless router´s hardware and software is modified so that a number of its GPIOs are connected to the bias lines of the antennas and controlled through the modified operating system of the router. A number of tests in various use case scenarios are conducted and performance of MR antenna systems is compared against the systems using the default omni-directional antennas. It is observed that the MR antennas provide significant improvement in typical indoor usage for TCP traffic.