On the influence of the propagation environment on throughput performance in indoor wireless network

Providing high capacity wireless networks that are able to support high throughput requirements within the constraint of finite bandwidth resource is crucial and has been the motivation of this work. Received signal quality may vary under different propagation environments due to variation in user location and base station deployment strategy. The investigation and analysis of throughput performance for downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) indoor wireless network is presented in this paper. This investigation requires a cross-layer model that takes into account the received signal quality in the physical layer and resource allocation in the medium access control layer. Results have shown that the coverage performance for an indoor wireless network that adopts the aligned configuration (AC) outperforms the offset configuration (OC) by 18% under a low throughput threshold using either maximum rate or equal allocation scheduling. At high throughput threshold, OC outperforms the AC by up to 33% given that MR is used as the scheduling scheme.