Evaluation of Diversity Antenna Designs Using Ray Tracing, Measured Radiation Patterns, and MIMO Channel Measurements

This paper presents an evaluation of the MIMO performance of three candidate antenna array designs, each embedded within a PDA footprint, using indoor wideband channel measurements at 5.2 GHz alongside channel simulations. A channel model which employs the plane-wave approximation was used to combine the embedded antenna radiation patterns of the candidate devices obtained from far-field pattern measurements and multipath component parameters from an indoor ray-tracer. The 4-element candidate arrays were each constructed using a different type of antenna element, and despite the diverse element directivities, pattern characteristics, and polarization purities, all three devices were constructed to fully exploit diversity in polarization, space, and angle. Thus, low correlation and high information theoretic capacity was observed in each case. A good match between the model and the measurements is also demonstrated, especially for 2 × 2 MIMO subsets of identically or orthogonally polarized linear slot antennas. The interdependencies between the channel XPD, directional spread and pathloss, and the respective impact on channel capacity are also discussed in this paper.