Performance Investigation of High Throughput WLAN 802.11n by Receiver Diversity and Antenna Spacing

The high throughput WLAN 802.11n exploits Multiple Input Multiple Output antenna to provide high throughput and high performance. It transmits the data into spatial streams to be more robust to multipath fading propagation environment. In this paper the performance of WLAN 802.11n is investigated by combining receiver diversity technique and antenna spacing on both transmitter and receiver. Configuration of 2x2 to 2x8 and 4x4 to 4x8 MIMO antennas with spacing varied every lambda/4 betwen lambda/4 to 2 lambda are investigated under in-door channel model. The more receiver antenna, the probability of signal fading is lessen, the better the performance is. The farther space between antennas, the lower the correlation and interference, the better the performance is with the cost of wider size of hardware.