WLAN MIMO Terminal Test in Reverberation Chamber

Convergence of portable consumer electronics, telecommunications, networking and multimedia entertainment platforms is nowadays a reality that demands increasing data rates and better coverage of wireless networks. In this context, MIMO antenna systems have been developed to raise the throughput without an increase in occupied bandwidth or modulation complexity and to improve coverage with no line of sight. Such advanced systems include complicated signal processing algorithms that have to drive very elaborated communication protocols and make the RF specifications on the transmitters and receivers more stringent. There is a need for a test method that provides verification of the full system, with the antennas included, proving to be reliable and to yield results that resemble the real world performance. This Master Thesis report presents a method to characterize full system MIMO WLAN performance in terms of link throughput by using a reverberation chamber to provide Rayleigh fading conditions resembling the multipath indoor environment in which WLAN most usually has to perform together with shielding from interference. ii iii Preface This report is a Master Thesis work for the completion of the MSc degree in Telecommunication Systems and Networks Engineering at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It has been carried out in the framework of an agreement with Chalmers University of Technology after a previous exchange year of taking courses in Chalmers inside the European Erasmus program. The work, including measurements in the reverberation chamber, was carried out in the Bluetest High Performance chamber located in Bluetest's office in Gothenburg except for the RF characterization of the router that was performed with the instruments in the laboratory of the Antenna Group in Chalmers. The post-processing of reference measurements for the time-domain characterization of the chamber was done by Chen Xiaoming, Ph. D. student at the Antenna Group in Chalmers.