Sector Antenna and DFE Modems for High Speed Indoor Radio Communications

This paper examines the outage probabilities of BPSK and BPSK/DFE radio modems with omnidirectional and six-sector antennas. The effects of room size, data rate, transmitted power and sector antenna patterns on the performance of the systems are analyzed. A 2-D ray tracing algorithm is used to model the radio propagation in a typical indoor environment used for wireless LAN applications. The parameters of the radio propagation model are adjusted to fit the results of simulations to the results of empirical measurements with omnidirectional antenna. It is shown that in a line-of-sight (LOS) environment, a six-sector antenna is more effective than a DFE with an omnidirectional antenna at eliminating the effects of multipath. For an obstructed-line-of-sight (OLOS) environment where at least one wall exists between the transmitter and the receiver, the DFE is more effective than the six-sector antenna. It is shown that a BPSK/DFE modem with a six-sector antenna can support data rates close to 20 Mbps.