WLAN Downlink Throughput Enhancement in Conference Rooms Using a Multi-Antenna Access Point

This paper explores the enhancement of WLAN downlink throughput in a conference room environment using a multi-antenna access point. The downlink transmission uses antenna patterns to spatially separate multiple users so that they can be simultaneously served, rather than sequentially, thereby speeding up the downlink throughput. This can be useful when several users are attempting to download long documents at the same time and sequential transmission causes a throughput bottleneck. A theoretical analysis with a room response model is used to obtain the statistics of separability in terms of minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). It is shown that for this modeled conference room environment, a two-antenna access point can theoretically deliver a two-user minimum SINR of 20 dB for about 80% of the realizations, which would, neglecting overhead, likewise increase the throughput by 80%. Higher increases may be possible using more antennas to simultaneously serve more than two users.