A comparison between the performance of FHSS and DSSS for wireless LANs using a 3D ray tracing program

A 3D ray tracing program developed at the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute for the simulation of micro-cellular radio propagation is used to generate the impulse response between two nodes of a wireless LAN, when the transmitter and receiver are located at arbitrary points within an office area. This time-domain channel response is then used to compare the performance of systems employing frequency-hopping and direct-sequence spread spectrum modulation. When averaged over many locations for the transmitter and/or receiver, this yields a site-specific comparison of the two modulation strategies. Performance criteria are error and outage probability as a function of transmitted power and data rate.