A Wireless Network for Wide-Band Indoor Communications

We propose and analyze a wide-band indoor communication system that uses radio as the transmission medium either on a stand-alone basis or to supplement a hard-wired network for those situations where complete portability is desired. One principal impairment to such a system is intersymbol interference caused by frequencyselective fading. A novel media-access scheme is proposed which permits the use of resource sharing, wherein a small pool of time slots is effectively shared among all users to provide added protection against channel impairments on an as-needed basis. Our results show that the use of resource sharing and diversity provide excellent protection against intersymbol interference caused by frequency-selective fading with negligible impact on throughput. Furthermore, resource sharing plus diversity can permit significantly higher data rates without large queueing delays. For example, a wireless network with a .10 Mbit/s data rate in a 10 MHz bandwidth using four antennas at the base station has aless than outage probability at a BER in buildings with less than 58 ns rms delay spread. A loading of 75 percent is permitted for a queueing delay of less than 20 packet transmission times all but 0.01 percent of the time.