Performance of MIMO-OFDM WLAN Systems and Antenna Subset Selection

This paper compares the packet error rate (PER) performance of several transmit/receive architectures for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. We focus our study on systems based on the IEEE 802.11a/g standard. Spatial multiplexing architectures like minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection with joint encoding at the transmitter are compared to diversity architectures based on space-time coding (STC). Performance results from single-input single-output (SISO) and single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems are also included in order to compare the two mentioned MIMO architectures to existing 802.11a/g compliant architectures. Finally, the performance study is extended to MIMO systems using subset antenna selection at the receiver. Simulation results show that the coverage of MIMO diversity schemes is substantially bigger than the coverage of MIMO multiplexing schemes based on MMSE or zero-forcing (ZF). However, the coverage gap reduces when comparing the performance of the architectures aided with antenna subset selection.