EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
Volume 2005 (2005), Issue 16, Pages 2730-2738
doi:10.1155/ASP.2005.2730

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

Khoi D. Le,1,2 Michael W. Hoffman,1 and Robert D. Palmer2

1Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln 68588, NE, USA
2School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman 73019, OK, USA
3School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma, Norman 73019, OK, USA

Received 31 January 2004; Revised 28 October 2004

Copyright © 2005 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

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 20 m×10 m×3 m 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.