Performance analysis of multicarrier modems in an office environment using 3D ray tracing

Using a 3D radio propagation model based on ray optics and the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD), the outage probabilities of multicarrier BPSK and QPSK radio modems with and without Reed Solomon coding schemes in a typical office environment are examined. The accuracy of the model is examined by comparing the results of computer simulations with those obtained from empirical measurements. The effects of key parameters such as number of carriers, bandwidth efficiency, roll-off factor of filters and adjacent channel interference are analyzed. It is shown that in a typical office environment, multicarrier modems with simple block coding schemes can provide data rate on the order of 20 Mbps which are suitable for wireless LAN applications.