An OFDM WLAN baseband receiver with space diversity

In the paper, we present the design and implementation of a baseband receiver with space diversity for IEEE 802.11a OFDM wireless local area network (WLAN). The single-antenna OFDM receiver has been implemented in a single chip. To improve the system performance, we adopt two antennae and apply maximal ratio combining (MRC) for attaining space diversity. We then implement an MRC-based IEEE 802.11a WLAN baseband receiver using two receiver ICs and an FPGA. Actual measurements demonstrate that under several different channel conditions the space diversity receiver outperforms the original single-antenna receiver by up to 8 dB in SNR.