OFDM Wireless LANs: A Theoretical and Practical Guide

Receive Diversity

The use of multiple antennas at the receiver, which is referred to as receive diversity, is fairly easily exploited. In essence, multiple copies of the transmitted stream are received, which can be efficiently combined using appropriate signal processing techniques. As the number of antennas increases, the outage probability is driven to zero, and the effective channel approaches an additive Gaussian noise channel. The two most popular receive diversity techniques are selection and maximal ratio combining.

Selection Diversity

The simplest receive diversity is selection diversity. Because of its simplicity, current IEEE 802.11b WLAN products employ selection diversity at the mobile terminal (MT) and access point (AP). Given ...