On the use of a reverberation chamber to test the performance and the immunity of a WLAN system

Abstract

The paper presents some results concerning the use of a reverberation chamber (RC) to test a wireless local area network (WLAN) system using the standard IEEE 802.11b/g. The whole link (access point and terminal) was operating inside the RC under different chamber loading conditions and varying the stirrer rotating speed. The effects of this multipath environment on system performances were checked measuring three transmission quality estimators: the ping average round trip time, the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error, and the data retries. The behavior of these parameters, as function of the bitrate set for the link, was also analyzed. The same RC was used to carry out a radiated immunity test on the same WLAN. The undesired signal was both a modulated and continuous wave injected into the used channel and into adjacent channels. The modulated wave is that prescribed by the IEC 61000-4-3 standard.