Characterization of the Indoor/Outdoor to Indoor MIMO Radio Channel at 2.140 GHz

In this paper the radio channel characteristics of the 8 × 4 MIMO system consisting of a base station and a small terminal equipped with multiple antennas for indoor-indoor and outdoor-indoor scenarios are presented. We study the large-scale variation and small-scale characteristics of the measured channel coefficients. Although the mean received power is very much dependent on the measured location, the channel capacity seems to be unchanged when the receiver’s location is altered. The data collected from different scenarios (e.g. measurement locations, antenna setting) were used to investigate the advantage of having the knowledge of the channel at both ends of the transmission link. It is shown that using the water filling algorithm there is indeed an increase in the channel capacity. At low SNR, the benefit of knowing the channel at both link ends observed in the measurement data is much higher than which can be obtained in the channel matrix with usual assumption on identical independently distributed components. Using the small-scale and large-scale information in the formulation of the channel capacity we show that in our measurement, the variation of the mean received power has a greater influence on the change of the overall system performance than the change in the environmental multipath scattering property.