Antenna selection for performance enhancement of MIMO Technology in Wireless LAN

The demand for Wireless Network hardware has experienced phenomenal growth during the past several years. The most commonly known component to enhance the performance of Wireless network is Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system. It exploits the radio channel by means of multi-path propagation; where the transmitted information bounces off walls, doors and other objects before reaching the receiving antennas multiple times via different routes and with different time delay. MIMO harnesses multi-path with a technique known as space division multiplexing. The transmitting Wireless device actually split a data stream into multiple parts called spatial streams, for transmission. This enhances the data rate. There are two features that focus on improving MIMO performance; called beamforming and diversity. By increasing the number of physical antennas at both transmitter and receiver enhances the performance of MIMO system. To achieve the desired performance the system can be designed in such a way that the number of physical antenna selection at both transmitter and receiver should maximize the performance and optimize the entire system cost.