Comparison of Antenna Array Systems Using OFDM for Software Radio via the SIBIC Model

This paper investigates the performance of two candidates for software radio WLAN, reconfigurable OFDM modulation and antenna diversity, in an indoor environment. The scenario considered is a 20m× 10m × 3m room with two base units and one mobile unit. The two base units use omnidirectional antennas to transmit and the mobile unit uses either a single antenna with equalizer, a fixed beamformer with equalizer, or an adaptive beamformer with equalizer to receive. The modulation constellation of the data is QPSK and 16-QAM. The response of the channel at the mobile unit is simulated using a three-dimensional indoor WLAN propagation model that generates multipath components with realistic spatial and temporal correlation. An underlying assumption of the scenario is that existing antenna hardware is available and could be exploited if software processing resources are allocated. The results of the simulations indicate that schemes using more resources outperform simpler schemes in most cases. This implies that desired user performance could be used to dynamically assign software processing resources to the demands of a particular indoor WLAN channel if such resources are available.