Impact of power limitations on the performance of WLANs for home networking applications

This paper considers the application of 5 GHz wireless LAN technology to home networking applications. An assessment of physical layer performance is presented in the form of the achievable data rate as a function of received signal to noise ratio. The transmit power limitations imposed by the relevant regulatory bodies are also summarised. Based on this information, a state of the art propagation modelling tool is used to evaluate the coverage achieved by a WLAN system in an example residential environment in terms of the achieved data rate.