A spatial diversity scheme for fixed point indoor wireless communication

Abstract

The ease with which indoor wireless systems can be installed has become their main selling feature. A desirable application for wireless systems is the transmission of compressed digital music in an indoor shopping mall environment. The indoor environment, with its many walls and highly reflective surfaces, has a high level of multipath. High levels of slowly changing multipath can cause deep fades, and therefore reduce the reliability of the system. The proper use of multiple receiving elements is one way to mitigate the deep fades caused by multipath. The main objective of this thesis is to study a simple and cost effective approach to combining the signals from several receiving elements. A novel diversity combining approach using 2 receiving elements is presented. The novel diversity combining approach consists of periodically changing the phase of one of the two received signals. A set of simulations was developed to study the effectiveness of the novel diversity combining method in mitigating deep multipath fades. The relative performances of two different implementations of the diversity combining were compared to a baseline test case that did not include diversity combining. In both of the simulated implementations, the diversity combining approach proved to be an effective means of mitigating the multipath fading phenomenon. A proof-of-concept, bench-top hardware prototype was also developed. The transmitter and receiver were implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The laboratory testing of the hardware successfully illustrated the feasibility of the proof-of-concept system.