Mimo: multipath signals and location aware

Abstract

IEEE 802.11n is a technical standard developed by IEEE 802.11 working group and the „draft 2.0‟ milestone was attained in March 2007. In September 2009, the IEEE 802.11n was finally completed and ratified. IEEE 802.11n provides a new set of capabilities dramatically improving reliability of communications, coverage and overall throughput of devices. IEEE 802.11n incorporates Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) spatial multiplexing, which takes advantages of multipath signals. Spatial multiplexing allows MIMO wireless systems to obtain high spectral efficiency but it is vulnerable to rank deficiencies in the MIMO channel matrix. Hence, the performance decreases with increasing spatial correlation in the channel. In this report, experimental study was conducted to investigate the multipath effect and the improvement to the signal quality by measuring the QoS parameters between MIMO (802.11n) and SISO (802.11a/b/g) under line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) environment. Three testing environments were chosen for the experimental study. The first testing environment was in an anechoic chamber where there is minimum reflection and scattering. Second testing environment was in a shielded enclosure where it is an extremely rich correlated multipath environment. The third testing environment was in an indoor lounge room. This report also aims to investigate the accuracy and coverage of indoor localization when using MIMO technology, as compared to SISO technology in 5GHz band. Lastly, this report will evaluated the performance of throughput over various distance between IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11n in NLOS environment.