Performance of 802.11n WLAN with transmit antenna selection in measured indoor channels

Transmit antenna selection (TAS) has been known to be an effective technique to obtain the benefits of a multiple- input-multiple-output (MIMO) system while dramatically reducing the hardware complexity. In this paper, the bit and packet error performance of an IEEE 802.11n wireless local area network (WLAN) with TAS is investigated based on three measured MIMO-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) correlated channels. The propagation scenarios under investigation include an atrium with and without line-of-sight (LoS), and a lecture theater with LoS. The simulation results reveal that TAS technique could dramatically improve the error performance of an IEEE 802.11n WLAN. For all the three measured channels, TAS could achieve a signal-to-noise (SNR) improvement by at least 6 dB. It is also found that the TAS technique could achieve a larger SNR improvement in a correlated MIMO-OFDM channel than in an i.i.d channel. Therefore, we prove in this paper that TAS is a powerful technique to further improve the error performance and enhance the range of an IEEE 802.11n WLAN.