Comparison of the Smart Antenna Architectures for OFDM-WLAN Systems in a Rich Multipath Environment based on a Spatio-Temporal Channel Model

The smart antenna technique as a method of improving the physical layer performance of OFDM WLANs is studied. For this purpose, a comparison of the smart antenna architectures for IEEE802.11a WLAN system using pre-FFT and post-FFT array processing with different parameters is represented. Simulations are performed on a new Simulink model for IEEE802.11a system using a spatio-temporal channel modeling which is based on the measured wideband channels in the 5GHz band. Raw bit-error-rate performance for QPSK/16QAM modulations at LOS and NLOS channel scenarios are evaluated and compared.