The need for higher data rates in WLANs boosts drastically because tremendous consumer interest in emerging multimedia applications, such as HDTV, has been increased. Currently, the IEEE 802.11a/b/g WLANs provide a limited data rate for the current user application requirements. In order to overcome substantial limitations of the existing WLANs, the next generation of WLANs, IEEE 802.11n, is in the course of development and expected to support higher throughput, larger coverage area and better QoS. The high performance IEEE 802.11n WLAN can improve data rate significantly by using smart antenna systems in the physical layer to take advantage of multi-path fading of wireless channels.In this thesis, an analytical model is developed to study the MAC performance andthe underlying smart antenna technologies used in multi-path fading channels. Multipleantennas employed in the AP arise two popular approaches to provide a significant performance improvement, diversity and multiplexing. Considering the diversity gain of multiple antennas at the AP in which the AP with multiple antennas serves one user at a time, the capacity and throughput can be obtained. In addition, the AP is possible to serve multiple users in the downlink, by exploiting the multiplexing gain of the wireless channel. We investigate the maximum network throughput when the traffic intensity of the AP approaches to one. Unlike most of previous research which focus on either the physical or the MAC layer performance, our analytical model jointly considers the MAC protocol and the smart antenna technology.
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