Transmitter noise effect on the performance of a MIMO-OFDM hardware implementation achieving improved coverage

This paper presents analysis of performance measurements from a MIMO-OFDM IEEE 802.11n hardware implementation at 5.2 GHz using four transmitters and four receivers. Two spatial multiplexing systems are compared; one which uses a zero-forcing (ZF) detector and the other a list sphere detector (LSD). We show that the measured results do not align with standard prediction based on simulation assuming uncorrelated receiver noise. We show that the discrepancy can be explained by the inclusion of transmitter noise into the channel model. This effect is not included in existing MIMO-OFDM channel models. The measured results from our hardware implementation show successful packet transmission at 600 Mb/s with 15 bits/s/Hz spectral efficiency at 73% coverage for ZF and 84% coverage for LSD with an average receiver signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 26 dB.