Enhancement of HIPERLAN/2 Systems using Space-Time Coding

The development of broadband wireless communication systems must cope with various performancelimiting challenges that include channel fading as well as size and power limitations at the mobile units. As a promising method dealing with these challenges, spacetime coding is effective in supporting reliable, high-data rate transmissions: the major goal in broadband wireless communications. Space-time coding relies on multiantenna transmission that are combined with appropriate signal processing at the receiver to provide a diversity gain. In this paper, we investigate the performance of using space-time coding in HIPERLAN/2 which is a European-standard for high-speed Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) operating in the 5 GHz frequency band. Software-simulated physical layer performance results are presented and first results show that Packet-ErrorRate (PER) performance is enhanced by almost 4 dB when using space-time coding in the HIPERLAN/2 system.