Performance Evaluation of Indoor Wireless Systems Using BLAST Testbed

BLAST(Bell Labs Layered Space-Time)[1] has been shown to provide high capacity wireless communications by using multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver. We have built a narrowband wireless BLAST testbed with multiple transmit and receive antennas. In this work, using the experimental testbed results, we examine the performance of the VBLAST [2, 3] by optimally choosing the antenna configuration and performing link adaptation. The over-the-air error traces are used to simulate H.263 video of rate 230kbps. The video performance under physical layer and network layer error handling are discussed.