Performance studies for high-speed indoor wireless communications

Abstract

A major difficulty in achieving high-bit-rate wireless transmission is the large delay spread which severely limits the maximum data rate. In this paper, techniques are presented for overcoming these transmissionrate limits. Specifically, the performances of multicarrier modems and a single-carrier modem with equalization are characterized in terms of the efficiency (or achievable bit rate) versus outage, under a wide range of conditions and parameters.

For the multicarrier approach, the extensive set of performance results indicate the following: for QPSK, in a typical office-building environment (rms delay spreads of 50–100 ns), if the subchannel symbol rate is limited to 1 Mbaud,and provided there is sufficient power, an efficiency of 1–1.2 b/s/Hz can be achieved with 99% availability (1% outage) with either the multitone or the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing realizations. With 16 subchannels this corresponds to at least 16 Mb/s. To achieve higher data rates (for example, 155 Mb/s), or where there are larger delay spreads (for example, in outdoor microcells), more subchannels can be used, if practical. Otherwise, equalization can be combined with wider subchannels and/or sophisticated antenna techniques.

Link-budget calculations, also presented here, show how transmitted power can be a limiting factor in transmission bit rate. In particular, for 20 MHz of bandwidth and a frequency of 5 GHz or less, a transmitted power of 100 mW to 1 W should be sufficient to accommodate 30–50 m cells with good performance (for example, bit error probability of 10⁻⁸ and 1% outage). However, for larger bandwidths (for example, 100–200 MHz), the frequency must be higher (for example, 20 GHz) and the distance will be severely limited, possibly to a single room.