OTA Characterization of Dual-User IEEE 802.11be EHT-MU Under Transmit-Chain Imbalance

This paper presents a controlled over-the-air (OTA) characterization of dual-user IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput Multi-User (EHT-MU) transmission under transmit-chain imbalance. The objective is to determine whether attenuation applied to one access-point transmit chain produces packet-global degradation or appears primarily as stream-dependent payload degradation after receiver processing. Measurements are performed in a shielded RF enclosure using two NI USRP-2953R and NI USRP-2942R software-defined radios, with one USRP generating a dual-user non-OFDMA EHT-MU waveform and the other implementing synchronized dual-branch packet recovery. A calibrated attenuation sweep is applied to the second AP transmit chain (TX2), and performance is evaluated using bit error rate (BER), EHT-Data error vector magnitude (EVM), control-field success probability, payload-success probability, and subcarrier-level EVM distributions. The results show that the stream decoded as User~1 remains at the BER floor over the tested range, while the stream decoded as User~2 exhibits progressive EVM degradation followed by threshold-like BER and payload-success collapse. Common signaling fields remain recoverable, indicating that the dominant observed failure mode is stream-local at the receiver output than the packet-global. Replacing User~2 binary convolutional coding (BCC) with low density parity check (LDPC) coding delays the BER and payload-success collapse by approximately \(5\)~dB of TX2 attenuation, demonstrating a measurable coding-dependent robustness margin for the more sensitive stream.